


A Code Word for Caring

by aliaoftwoworlds



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Civil War Team Iron Man, Gen, Hurt Tony, Not Steve Friendly, Offscreen Torture, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), but sam gets redeemed, not team Cap friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-12 17:29:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 41,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15999962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliaoftwoworlds/pseuds/aliaoftwoworlds
Summary: Sam, Steve, Clint, and Scott are attacked on their way back to the US after being pardoned and are taken prisoner by HYDRA, along with none other than Tony Stark. Tensions are high already and HYDRA being involved makes everything worse, but what they’re put through may help Sam to humanize not just Stark, but the rest of his team too, and force him to accept that nothing is really as black and white as he’d like to think.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I really should be updating Electric Veins, but I’ve got some serious writer’s block where that story is concerned right now, and I don’t want to force it or it’ll turn out crappy. The next chapter is half written, but every time I open it up to continue I just… sit there. So I decided to start this one in the meantime, which I’ve had planned out for a while now.

They’re on their way home. It’s almost unbelievable, in multiple ways. Two months isn’t really that long, but it felt like forever when they were hiding out in Wakanda wondering if anything would ever change, unable to go out and speak for themselves, not to mention constantly worried that T’Challa would come by and kick them out. He’d made it clear at the start of their stay that it wasn’t intended to be permanent, after all.

On the other hand, two months isn’t very long for something like pardons to go through. Sam’s intimately familiar with government procedures and how long they take, how much unnecessary paperwork and red tape and argument there is for even the simplest things. And after everything that had happened, it’s incredible to Sam that they’d been pardoned at all, much less so soon.

When they’d first arrived in Wakanda, freshly broken out of the Raft, Sam—and the others as well—had been full of righteous fury at how they’d been treated and everything that had happened to them. The Raft and Ross’s manipulations served as proof to Sam that the Accords had been everything bad he’d imagined, that Steve had been right to fight against them and Stark was just too stubborn to see it. Clint and Wanda raged against Stark himself, which Sam thought was a little ridiculous on Clint’s part—Stark hadn’t been the one to call and ask him to leave his family, after all, but Sam wasn’t stupid enough to say that to Clint’s face—but he thought Wanda had some legitimate grievances. 

Sam himself had certainly seen Stark in a new light when he saw Barnes and heard Steve’s short explanation of what had happened in Siberia. Through the whole thing over the Accords, Sam had felt some sympathy for Stark, thinking the man was caught in a difficult place. He’d had good intentions with taking responsibility for the damages they caused, even if he was going about it in a stupid way and working with an asshole like Ross. It had been that sympathy that had made Sam tell Stark where Steve and Barnes were going when he came to visit them in the Raft.

Obviously, that had been a mistake. After Steve broke them out of the Raft, Sam was a lot more inclined to agree with Wanda’s and Clint’s assessments of Stark’s character—namely their condemnations of him. After all, he’d betrayed Sam, manipulated him and then gone to Siberia to try to kill Steve and Barnes. He’d put them all into an impossible spot with the Accords and then acted like they were off the rails for fighting against them. 

But after a while in Wakanda, it was a little harder to see their own actions in such a nice light. Stuck there with nothing to do but watch the news, no one to fight and nowhere to go, Sam watched people react to what they’d done, and he started to see it a little differently.

Everything he’d done had seemed right from his point of view. He’d done what he’d had to in the moment each time, but for the first time, he was seeing their fights from a normal citizen’s point of view, and… he could see why people were afraid of the Avengers. He could hardly say it was an overreaction to say that people were afraid of “where they’d strike next” when he saw that the tunnel collapse in Bucharest had killed sixteen people, or the totals for damages they’d caused at the airport in Germany.

Stark was the one paying for it. That had made it more difficult to judge the man so thoroughly, to hate him like Clint and Wanda clearly did. Even though he’d barely caused any of the damages in Germany, he was paying for everything, taking responsibility for the fight. Steve’s team certainly wouldn’t be. And Stark was giving money and making personal visits to the people injured and the families of those killed in Bucharest, a fight he wasn’t even involved in. All of that… it deflated Sam’s desire to just condemn Stark as an asshole and a liar. Maybe he’d lied to Sam about Siberia, but he was still obviously a good person, trying to make up for mistakes made.

And Sam isn’t stupid. Steve had been cagey since breaking them out of the Raft, when he’d always been open with Sam before. He’d said surprisingly little about the subject of whatever had happened in Siberia that had resulted in Barnes being down an arm and Steve no longer having his shield. And Sam hadn’t missed the fact that the news reports about Stark visiting people from Bucharest showed the man bruised and scraped, arm in a sling and moving gingerly and slowly like an old man. Steve had said they’d done nothing but disable Stark’s suit in Siberia, but… something more had happened than what Steve had told them. That much was obvious. Steve just wouldn’t say what.

And after all of that, to be going home so soon… that’s what made it unbelievable. Sam had been skeptical at first, particularly when the US representatives who’d contacted them through T’Challa had told them Stark was involved. But T’Challa had offered his own assurances that they were really being pardoned, helped them through what they needed to do—Sam had a feeling he was really just glad to be getting them out of his country—and sent them on their way.

They’re on a plane now, being escorted by Iron Man, who’s flying beside them. Stark had landed next to the jet in the suit ten minutes before their departure and completely ignored all of Steve’s attempts at conversation. He’d just stomped over to the pilot and exchanged a few words, never even removing his helmet, and then taken to the sky as they boarded. Sam is sure that he’d rather be just about anywhere else, but apparently, a part of the conditions of their pardons is that they’re monitored and escorted for a while, particularly outside the US. They’ve been pardoned by their own country, but they’re still unwelcome in quite a few others, and until that’s resolved, they’re going to be on probation, essentially, which means that Stark and maybe Vision or Rhodes will have to be around all the time. Fun for all parties involved, Sam’s sure.

It’s just Sam, Clint, Scott, and Steve on the plane. Natasha’s already back in the States, only having left for a short time after breaking the Accords and betraying Stark in Germany, apparently. Her pardon had come through pretty fast and she’d gone back on her own. Barnes had been woken from cryo before they’d left and was told what was going on, but T’Challa’s sister was still working on something for his head, and he was a bit of a special case, with his brainwashing and his history. There were a lot of countries out there who were foaming at the mouth wanting to take in the Winter Soldier, not only for his crimes, but also because he was still an unknown with triggers in his head that might cause him to go crazy any minute, or so they seemed to think. It made it particularly difficult to argue for Barnes being brought back home with them, and so he has to head back separately.

Wanda is coming back on her own too, for many of the same reasons. She’s persona non grata in even more countries than the rest of them, and Sokovia in particular wants her head now. Steve argued against her being brought back on her own, claiming it was bias against her and that she was being treated unfairly, but one of the lawyers involved with them had flatly stated that they were expecting a lot of very public protesting when their plane landed, and the government was demanding that the biggest security risks as well as the most highly contested pardons—Wanda and Barnes—be transported separately.

Sam’s not exactly looking forward to all of the crap they’re going to have to deal with when they land, but it’s good to be going home. He’s grateful enough for that to deal with whatever comes, and until then, they’ve got at least another five hours of flight ahead of them, and Sam wants to spend them relaxing, remembering home and looking forward to going back instead of worrying about what the crowds will be shouting when they disembark.

He doesn’t get much of a chance. One moment everything seems to be normal, but then suddenly there’s a sound like an explosion just outside the jet and the entire thing tilts violently to the side, sending Sam sprawling across an aisleway.

Scott is on the floor next to him; Clint and Steve have managed to cling to the seats. The plane levels out again, but he can hear shouting from up in the cockpit. He struggles to his feet just as the plane accelerates and the force of it threatens to shove him backwards again. He uses the seats to pull himself forward, trying to get to the cockpit and find out what’s going on.

He’s nearly thrown off his feet when another explosion detonates and the plane swerves again. He manages to cling to the doorway of the cockpit as the pilots shout in alarm, and his brief view outside reveals two black aircraft converging on them.

“Iron Man is down!” One of the pilots is shouting into his headset. “We’ve been attacked by—” he swears and rips the headset off in the next second as it sparks on his head. More of the equipment is sparking and going out and the pilots are shouting to each other, trying to right the tilted jet just as one of the black crafts outside drops back and pulls up alongside them. 

The plane jolts, harder than before, and it sends Sam to his knees. There’s an awful grinding, squealing noise of metal on metal and shouts from his companions back in the plane; he tries to turn to go back to them and hears one of the pilots behind him shout “we’re being boarded!”

It doesn’t seem possible in mid-flight like they are, but sure enough, there’s a hole being cut through the side of the plane. Sam staggers to the back and tries to take up a fighting pose beside Steve, but the constant movements of the plane are making it difficult. They don’t have any of their weapons with them inside the plane and Sam momentarily curses for the lack of them. They’re supposed to be coming back to the US unarmed as a show of faith, even though they’ll be doing work with the Avengers soon enough, and so none of them are carrying so much as a pocket knife, much less a gun. Stark was their only armed guard, and it sounds like he’s out of it.

Another awful sound of metal being cut through echoes in the space, as the piece carved out of the side of the plane is crumpled and pulled inward as if by a gigantic hand, like it’s made of paper rather than thick metal and wiring. Sam hears Clint curse behind him as the jet shakes again, forcing all of them to cling to the seats or be thrown off their feet. He sees Scott out of the corner of his eye, pulling himself up in the back of the plane, and then there are people in black tactical gear pouring into the plane through the hole torn in the side.

Sam prepares to fight them, but the jet moves again, worse this time, and tosses all of them down, intruders as well. Sam’s head hits the side of one of the seats hard and the world goes fuzzy for a few moments. Just as his vision starts to clear, however, there’s a sharp pain in the back of his shoulder and things just get blurrier. His head is too heavy to hold up, there are sounds of a struggle behind him…

Sam wakes on a cold floor with a start. His head is aching, actually his whole body seems to be, and he groans and opens his eyes. He’s not on the jet anymore, but he’s not entirely sure where he is. A cold, gray, stained concrete ceiling is all that’s above him, the floor beneath him feels similar, and he has a very bad feeling about this.

“Sam?” It’s Steve’s voice, somewhere off to his left. He groans again and rolls over toward the voice, to be met with the sight of thick steel bars forming a kind of cage around him, and he knows they’re in deep shit.

He sits up and looks around. They’re in a large, plain concrete room that seems to be divided into cells by the heavy-duty bars. There are two rows of cells with an aisleway between them, and a large steel door set into the wall at the end of that aisle. He can see where some of the bars are cut out to form a door for each cell. Clint is slumped on the floor in the cell across the aisle from Sam, Steve on one side of him and an empty cell on the other. Sam looks to his right and sees Scott already awake and leaning against the wall of his cell. Scott acknowledges him with a small wave and a sigh. To Sam’s left is Stark, still unconscious on the floor as well.

“What happened?” Sam asks, moving forward to test the heavy bars of the cell. They’re absolutely solid, too close together to have any hope of slipping through but with enough space to put an arm through them, not that it matters. The door of the cell doesn’t even rattle, no give to it at all, and Steve look grim across from him.

“We were attacked in midair. HYDRA,” Steve says, and Sam’s stomach drops. This is bad. “They boarded the plane and hit us with some kind of tranquilizer. It took longer to affect me but eventually it got me too. I don’t know where we are, I just woke up here a few minutes before you.”

“The bars?” Sam asks, and Steve shakes his head.

“Tried them already.” He moves forward anyway to give them a pull, but though Sam can see his muscles straining and knows the serum-augmented strength should be enough for them, they don’t budge.

“Damn.” That’s Clint, waking up, and Steve moves to the side of his cell to reach through the bars for Clint. He can’t touch him, but he gets as close as he can and starts talking through the same routine he went through with Sam.

Sam takes the opportunity to explore his cell. The bars form three of the sides, hard concrete forming the last side, the floor, and the ceiling. The floor is stained with something that looks disturbingly like old blood. There are no windows anywhere in the prison, and only the one door out in the aisle. Each of the cells is about fifteen feet square, and completely bare except for a squat, rectangular chunk of concrete with a plastic cover at the back of each cell. Sam lifts the cover of his and discovers a hole set into the concrete to make a rudimentary toilet. It seems to extend down and back into whatever is behind the wall, but even if he had any inclination to go crawling through sewage to attempt to escape, the hole and pipe are carved from the concrete itself and way too small for a person to fit through.

Stark is the last to wake, letting out a soft groan and shifting on the floor of his cell. Like Steve did for Clint, Sam moves to the bars separating him from Stark, leaning into them and watching the man wake up. He wakes like Sam did, with a jolt, and pushes himself up with a wince, looking around his cell.

Sam tries to smile when Stark’s eyes land on him, but he’s pretty sure it just comes out as a grimace. Stark’s eyes dart around the cell and then the room at large, taking in everything the same way Sam had. Sam notices that Stark’s breathing is a little fast and labored, but before he can say anything, Stark is closing his eyes and forcing in a deep breath, centering himself for a few seconds. When he opens them again, he looks calm and focused, so Sam keeps his mouth shut.

Steve has noticed. “Tony?” He’s asking from his cell, moving over to the corner closest to them. “Are you okay?”

Sam doesn’t miss the way Stark’s shoulders tense and his jaw clenches just at the sound of Steve’s voice. Instead of answering, Stark pushes himself to his feet, holding one arm close to his body, and Sam wonders if he was injured when they were attacked. The rest of them had been drugged pretty quickly after the plane was boarded, but Iron Man had to have been taken out somehow, and Sam can’t imagine it was peaceful.

“HYDRA?” Stark asks, and both Sam and Steve nod curtly. Stark sighs and moves to the door of his cell, testing the bars the same way Sam and Steve had.

“No point,” Steve tells him, giving his bars another shake, but Stark ignores him.

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna try it for myself, thanks.”

Clint snorts from his cell. “Right, because you’re such an amazing genius, you’ll figure a way out that we haven’t. Too bad you can’t just pay them to let you go, huh? That’s what you do for everything else.”

Stark’s expression shutters, but he doesn’t back down, continuing his examination of the bars. Without even looking across at Clint, he says, “Too bad you don’t have an arrow to fire at them, huh? I’m sure that would solve everything.”

“Why don’t you fuck off, Stark,” Clint snaps, bristling. “We wouldn’t even be in this mess if it weren’t for you.”

Stark does look up at that, eyes narrowed. “I’d love to hear how this is _my_ fault.”

“Come on, man,” Scott says suddenly from his cell, speaking up for the first time since Sam woke. For the first time in a while, actually. He’d been pretty quiet ever since the Raft. He sounds tired, resigned.

“Clint,” Steve says, warning in his voice, but Clint snarls and ignores them both, keeping his eyes on Stark.

“We wouldn’t have even been in Wakanda if it weren’t for you getting into bed with Ross, and then lying to Sam and trying to kill Steve, you two-timing bastard, then we’re finally on our way home, we get attacked, and suddenly your _amazing_ suit is useless? Did you even try to defend us, or did you want this to happen?” Clint has moved forward to stand right at the front of his cell, across from Stark.

Stark’s whole frame has stiffened at Clint’s rant, but he isn’t looking at Clint. He’s staring at Steve, who’s looking away, something like guilt on his face, and Sam is confused. Before he can try to figure out what the hell is going on, though, Stark is speaking back to Clint, his voice as tight as the rest of his body looks. “ _You_ wouldn’t be here at all if you hadn’t abandoned Laura and the kids.” He doesn’t rise to the accusation of not fighting for them, doesn’t say anything about Ross or the Accords or Siberia, but it’s just like Stark to go for the jugular like that.

Clint punches the bars of his cell and Sam winces at the sound his hand makes when it strikes the metal—it must hurt like hell—but Clint doesn’t even seem to notice it, leaning forward like he’d like nothing more than to reach across the aisle and strangle Stark where he stands. Sam almost wants to flinch back from the raw, violent fury on his face. 

“Listen here, you fucking son of a bitch—” Clint starts, but before he can continue, there’s a squeal of metal and the door opens. They all fall silent and step back instinctively from the bars of their cells, watching the door warily as HYDRA agents in black jumpsuits flood into the room.

This can’t be good.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’d like to mention that although I have the not team Cap friendly tag on this story, the whole point of it is that things aren’t black and white and that’s an important realization for Sam. It's still not friendly to team cap and their shitty decisions and justifications (namely Steve), but it's more about them as people and less focused on what actually happened during the Civil War (despite what chapter 3 may have you think). It's still pretty Steve unfriendly even by the end, though, which is why I have that as a separate tag, and Steve gets a lot of crap particularly in the first few chapters, so don't worry after reading this one that what happens here won't be addressed.
> 
> Some of these chapters will probably be fairly short, but hopefully that means the trade-off is they’re updated quickly.

The agents coming in are all dressed the same way except for one. This one is a relatively normal-looking man in a fitted suit. With his normal dress, his casual demeanor, and his defined, almost handsome features, he could almost be mistaken for a regular businessman off the street, except for something about his expression. There’s danger in his eyes, a sort of hunger and a cruel amusement in the way he looks at his captives.

He takes a moment to just stand in the aisleway between the cells and look around at all of them, from one side of the room to the other. He barely glances over Scott and Sam, but his eyes linger on Stark for a few seconds. He passes over the empty cell across from Stark and then Clint in the next one over, and finally turns to face Steve. 

His back is to Sam now and Sam can’t see his face, but he can hear the smile in it. “Welcome,” the man says, spreading his hands, and Sam’s a little surprised at the bland, unaccented English. He sounds like he could have come straight from a small city in the Midwest; Sam had been expecting a foreigner, probably German. Come to think of it, he’s not sure what country they were over when their plane was taken down, and they could have been transported who knows how far while they were out.

“Who the hell are you?” Clint asks, and the man chuckles.

“You can call me Daniel.” Sam doubts it’s his real name.

“What do you want?” Steve demands, moving forward aggressively. None of the agents even make a move, however. They’re not intimidated by Steve in the least, locked in his cell.

“Ah, Captain America,” Daniel tuts, shaking his head in Steve’s direction. “The great paragon of virtue and justice.”

He says it like a taunt, and Steve sneers. “And the man who fights HYDRA scum like you.”

Daniel laughs outright this time. “Oh, of course. But it isn’t just HYDRA anymore, is it? You’ll fight anyone and anything that stands in your way. Whether it’s an alien, a teammate, or a bridge full of civilians, hm?”

“Shut up,” Sam says. The bastard has no idea what he’s talking about, and certainly no moral ground to stand on. But infuriatingly, Daniel doesn’t even acknowledge him.

“Tell me something, Captain. You’ve already shown that nothing matters but the select few you choose to protect; that you are willing to hurt innocents to get what you want, to fight against your own, to betray a friend. What else are you willing to sacrifice for your own ideals?”

“That’s not true!” Steve says, surging forward until he’s right at the bars of his cell. Sam sees his hand twitch like he wishes he could reach forward and grab Daniel, but knows the futility of trying and stops himself. 

Daniel chuckles again. “Oh, Captain, are you trying to lie to us, or yourself? We have seen the footage ourselves. Do you really think any of our bases are not under surveillance? We know what goes on in our territory, whether it’s a government office or a frozen tundra.”

It’s a clear reference to Siberia, and again, Sam wonders what the hell went on there that was so important it seems to be coming up again and again. The way Steve’s eyes fall away from Daniel just increases that feeling of wrong-footed suspicion in Sam. What Daniel had said about betraying a friend… more than ever, Sam wants to demand an explanation, to force Steve to talk to him and tell him the truth, the entire truth, of what happened in Siberia. But this isn’t the place or the time, certainly not while Daniel is right here.

Steve looks back up at Daniel, anger in his face. He may have been temporarily cowed by the thinly veiled taunts about Siberia, but he won’t back down in front of HYDRA. “What do you want?” he repeats.

“The answer to an… interesting question. I’d like to know, Captain, how you really rank the people in this room. Since you fight the hardest for those you like the most, why don’t we test who that is?” Sam still can’t see Daniel’s face, but the joy in his voice can hardly be more foreboding.

Steve just glares, but Daniel continues anyway, finally turning to examine the others again. “You see, we are in need of a… volunteer. Someone to give us information, if they’re so inclined. Though if not, well, we can also do with a warm body to use. Some of our newest agents need some training in certain… delicate areas, and what better way to develop one’s skills than practical experience? Information extraction is an art, and it requires a well-honed technique.”

“We’ll never tell you anything,” Sam says at the same time as Steve. Clint just snarls a curse, and Scott and Stark are both silent in their cells, though Sam can see from the corner of his eye that Scott is standing forward, arms crossed defiantly.

“You should know by now that I don’t give in to HYDRA,” Steve says, but Daniel just laughs yet again.

“I think you will, Captain, one way or another. Let’s test your dedication to your teammates, shall we? _You_ will be the one to choose who goes with us.”

Steve narrows his eyes. “No.”

Daniel shakes his head. “Not unexpected, Captain, but do you really think you can refuse? If you do not choose one, then we will simply take everyone, and we’ll torture them all just for the fun of it.”

Steve glares, but he stays silent, defiant. Hoping to call a bluff, maybe, but Sam is pretty sure they’re not bluffing. “Now, who will you choose?” Daniel asks patiently, calmly.

When Steve once again remains silent, Daniel gestures sharply to the other agents, who proceed to each of the cells, guns up and at the ready. “No!” Steve shouts, this time reaching through the bars. “Stop it!”

“Then choose, Captain.”

“Fine, me then! Take me! Just leave them alone,” Steve says, his arm still thrust through the bars like he can physically stop them from taking his teammates.

“Oh no, Captain, you do not get out of this decision so easily. With a sacrifice that serves a dual purpose: to make you into the martyr who so nobly throws himself in front of a bullet for his team, and to get you out of making the decision we’re putting before you, of revealing to your friends what you truly think of them. Oh, no. We have no need to test our physical interrogation techniques on the likes of you, but we are very interested to see how you make this choice. One of your companions, Captain. If you do not choose within the next ten seconds, we will take them all.”

“Steve,” Sam says suddenly, moving forward. “I’ll go.” His pounding heart betrays his reluctance to offer himself, he’s terrified of what HYDRA has in store, but… 

“How touching,” Daniel sneers, turning to face Sam for once. “Perhaps since you are so eager, we’ll show equal enthusiasm. Of course, you’ll probably be dead by tomorrow, and then we will have to have your great Captain choose again, but—”

“No!” Steve yells again, desperate, and Daniel turns back to him. “Don’t. I’ll—I’ll choose.” His voice doesn’t waver, but Sam can see the fear in his eyes.

“I grow impatient, Captain,” Daniel says, and Sam is paralyzed, watching him. He knows the others are too. He wouldn’t… Steve can’t really be making this choice. No matter the situation Daniel is trying to force them into, Steve wouldn’t give in. He must have a plan, he’s trying to lure Daniel into a false sense of security, or something. Steve wouldn’t really give in to HYDRA, no matter what they’re threatening.

Steve’s eyes travel over each of them in turn, and Sam has no idea what he’s thinking. If he’s trying to communicate silently with any of them, Sam isn’t getting it. But then Steve’s gaze drops, and Sam’s stomach along with it. He’s really going to do this. It can’t… this can’t be happening.

Steve stares hard at the floor for two long seconds, then visibly swallows. When he looks up, he doesn’t look at Daniel or any of the HYDRA agents. His eyes are fixed on the cell to Sam’s left and Sam’s mind wants to rebel, to deny that any of this is happening, even as he knows what’s happening, what’s coming.

“Stark—take Stark,” Steve says. It’s practically a whisper, but it’s deafening in the room and in Sam’s head.

Daniel doesn’t laugh, but Sam can hear the glee in his voice. “Ah, Captain, you show your true colors, _again_. Should I be disappointed to say this is not unexpected?” 

He gestures to the other agents again and this time they all move to Stark’s cell. They unlock it and step inside, guns raised, and Sam finally snaps out of his shocked examination of Steve to look over at the cell next to him.

Sam isn’t sure if it makes it worse that Stark doesn’t look surprised at all, just… resigned. Defiant too, with a hint of fear. He doesn’t bother resisting when the guards seize his arms and march him out of his cell. 

Sam wants to protest, he wants to shout at Steve, to scream at the guards and demand they take him instead, to do _anything_ , but he’s frozen in place. He just watches, numb with shock, as the procession moves and Stark disappears through the doorway with the agents. Daniel is the last to leave; he turns to regard them all with a satisfied smile, which broadens into a wide grin when he looks at Steve. He doesn’t need to say a word—it’s obvious what he’s thinking. Finally, after a few silent moments of watching them all like animals in cages, he turns and leaves, the heavy metal door slamming behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m loving the comments and speculations on this, I know I rarely respond to comments but I read them all and thank you <3 Even if the story doesn’t go the direction some of you are hoping, I hope you’ll still enjoy it anyway.

It doesn’t take long for Sam to recover from his numb paralysis. The sound of the door closing has barely stopped echoing in the room before he’s rounding on Steve, furious. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he shouts, and dimly registers that beside him, Scott is also facing Steve, arms crossed and distrust written across his face.

When Steve just looks at him, Sam feels even more of his anger boiling over. “You’d better talk to me, Steve, right now. What is wrong with you, man? How could you have done that?”

Steve glances briefly at the door and then into the corners of the room before looking back at Sam. Somewhere deep inside, Sam knows Steve is worried that they’re being watched, listened to, and he should be careful too, but right now he doesn’t care. He needs an explanation. He needs to know why this man he’s trusted everything to, considered righteous and virtuous and good, would have just willingly given a man to HYDRA.

“Sam,” Steve says quietly, “you don’t understand. You need to trust me here, please.”

Sam spreads his arms in invitation and waits for an explanation, but nothing comes. The frustration is churning his guts and clouding his mind; he aims a kick at the bars of his cell, which accomplishes nothing except that now his foot hurts almost as much as his heart. “Then _make me_ understand, Steve. Make me trust you. What don’t I understand? What could possibly justify what you just did?”

Steve just stares at him, grief and guilt in his expression, and it does nothing to calm Sam’s anger. Next to him, at Steve’s continued silence, Scott's incredulous voice comes. “Really? You’ve got nothing?” 

Sam swallows hard and takes a step back from the bars of his cell and from Steve. He shakes his head and sees the way Steve’s eyes track the movement, like he’s searching for a hint that Sam is going to forgive him for what he just did, or to trust him blindly with no information. Fuck, but that’s what he’s done before, hasn’t he? Trusted what Steve said without bothering to confirm it? If he hadn’t seen for himself what Steve had just done, would he be willing to just trust Steve?

“So you have nothing to say,” Sam says, and he can hear the defeat in his own tone. He doesn’t want to believe this of Steve, but he has no choice right now. Steve’s not even _trying_ to defend himself. “That’s… that’s disgusting, Steve. You’re a disgrace. A—a traitor.” He knows he’s just saying whatever cruel thought comes to his mind. He might very well regret this later, but right now he’s upset and angry and he’s not sure he can take another second looking at Steve just standing there watching him silently.

Steve closes his eyes at Sam’s words, but it’s Clint that speaks up, grumbling from his cell. “You heard the bastard, it was one of us or all of us. Better Stark than me.”

“Shut up,” Sam snaps, and though Clint aims a glare at him, he just glares right back. “If that’s really how you feel, then you never deserved to be called a hero, you selfish asshole.” Fuck, he’s alienating his friends and allies here and he knows it. He knows very well that you should never engage in the immediate aftermath of a volatile situation or something really upsetting. Anger is a beast and it controls you, it makes you say things you regret and hurt people you don’t really want to hurt.

But the situation is getting to him, and he can’t exactly remove himself from it. He has to be here right now, and he can’t just sit here and watch this. He can deal with a lot of things, but playing God, taking it upon oneself to decide who lives and dies, who’s worth saving and who’s not… it brings back bad memories and worse associations, and it’s one thing that sets Sam off. He lets out an angry snarl and starts pacing in his cell, trying to work off some of the anger through physical motion instead of shouting at his teammates.

“Whatever your problems with him, Stark’s still a good guy. He’s a damn hero too. You said yourself he was just trying to do what’s right, Steve,” Sam says, stopping in the corner of his cell to face Steve again, breathing hard. “Anyone who would willingly send him to be tortured because of a—a disagreement, or a fight, or whatever the hell happened, it’s—it’s pathetic. It’s cowardly.”

Steve does react to that, anger finally clouding his features. He slams a hand against the bars of his own cage. “You don’t—” he starts, glances over at the others, and then starts again, “Clint’s right, it was either one of us or all of us. They were serious, they would have done it, you saw that. What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to let all of us go,” Scott says suddenly, and they all turn to face him. He squirms a little under the scrutiny, looking uncomfortable, but continues, “I mean, come on, man, I don’t want to—to be tortured any more than the next guy, but I don’t think I could pick someone to go in my place.”

The guilt is back in Steve’s face, replacing the anger, and Sam nods along with Scott. “He’s right, Steve. Maybe it was one of us or all of us, but it’s HYDRA we’re talking about. You had no guarantee they wouldn’t take all of us anyway. And even if you could trust them to keep their word, you don’t get to make that decision. Who gave you the right to decide who goes and who doesn’t?”

It’s not quite anger, but frustration tightens Steve’s features. “I didn’t choose it, they forced it on me!”

“No, they gave you a choice, and you chose to pick one of us. You chose to pick Stark. You had another option: stay silent. Refuse to pick someone. Refuse to rank your teammates. Maybe it would have ended in all of us being hauled away, but it would have been the honorable thing to do. You might think you made the pragmatic choice, Steve, but it sure as hell wasn’t the heroic one.”

Steve actually flinches away at that, dropping his gaze like he can’t stand to look at Sam. Sam’s too worn out to feel any kind of triumph for it.

Clint speaks up again from his cell. “Lay off, Sam. You’re not the one who had to make the fucking choice. You might sit there and pretend to be all noble now, but I bet you’d have been singing a different tune if it was _you_ they made pick someone.”

That stokes a little of Sam’s anger again. Clint has a way of doing that to him, and if they were in a better situation, he might not rise to the taunt. But he does. “Yeah, Clint, we all know you’re glad he picked Stark. We know you’d probably pay to have Stark hauled off by HYDRA. But what happens when they come back, huh? What happens when they’re done with him and they make Steve choose again? After all, he’s already proved he’s got a hierarchy for us.”

He turns to face Steve again. “If they come back and demand someone else, who goes next, Steve? Scott? After all, you barely know him, right? Then who’s next after that, me or Clint? Which one of us is higher on the totem pole? Which one has pissed you off less?”

That shuts Clint up. Sam feels a surge of mixed satisfaction and guilt at seeing the way Clint’s now looking at Steve with suspicion, and the lost, upset look on Steve’s face. He should regret it, but it’s true, it’s not like anything he said was a lie. And some of it might just be his own fear coming through, too. If that really does happen, if they come back and demand Steve keep choosing again and again, when will it be Sam’s turn to go? Would he feel worse being chosen earlier, knowing Steve would rather protect someone else than him, or would the guilt of being protected over the others be worse? All he knows is that if it comes to that, there’ll be no recovering from it. If that choice has to be made, it will tear their team apart.

“Sam, please, stop,” Steve says, and Sam does, in fact, stop at the pleading tone in Steve’s voice. He takes a deep breath to calm himself. He should give this a chance. He’s letting his anger run away with him, and he knows that’s not good. 

“You want me to trust you, Steve?” Steve nods, hope in his eyes, and Sam steels himself to ask what he knows he should have months ago. “Then why don’t you tell me what happened in Siberia.”

Steve blinks, confused, but Sam thinks he can detect a hint of reluctance there—or maybe he’s just imagining it because he expects it. “What do you mean?” Steve asks hesitantly. “I already told you what happened.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Steve,” Sam snaps, and Steve physically recoils, a reaction out of proportion to Sam’s demand… unless, of course, Steve’s hiding something. Something serious. “I’m not an idiot, don’t treat me like one. You barely said anything after you came back. All you told us was that Stark tried to kill Barnes and you disabled his suit. You came back beat up and Barnes was missing an arm, so I believed you, but you were pretty sparse on the details.”

Sam takes a deep breath and admits his own faults, lays them out in the hope that he can convince Steve to do the same. “I didn’t look beyond that because I didn’t want to. I ignored the fact that even though you said he was fine, Stark showed up on the news a week later looking like he’d gone through a car compactor. I was pissed because Stark promised me he’d go as a friend, and then you came back and said he’d attacked you. But I didn’t want to think about how, exactly, that happened. If Stark had really gone there with the intention of betraying you, like you made it sound, why did he go alone? Why not take Ross’s goons with him? And if he really tried to kill Barnes, like you’d said, I can’t help but wonder… why didn’t he? We’ve all seen what that suit can do, Steve. It’s got missiles in it that could take down an entire bunker. Lasers that could cut through tanks like butter. I think we all know, deep down, if Stark went dark side, we’d all be fucked. And the more I think about this, the more things aren’t adding up.”

“What does it matter?” Clint says. He sounds tired, now. He’s not so much defending Steve—still looking at Steve with suspicion and wariness from Sam’s question earlier—as he is just trying to get them to shut up. But Sam doesn’t care.

“It matters because it seems to keep coming up. Not only were we going to go back home and have to work with him again, but now even HYDRA agents are bringing it up? I’d say that’s important. And even if it didn’t keep coming up… maybe you don’t give a shit who you work with, Barton, but I like to know the kind of people I’m throwing my lot in with.” Clint snarls at the words, probably making a connection to SHIELD and HYDRA that Sam didn’t exactly mean, but doesn’t regret.

“Sam.” Steve looks hurt, maybe making the same connection, but Sam just narrows his eyes. He won’t give in to guilt over forcing this confrontation until he has the truth. 

“Well?” Sam demands, crossing his arms, and he sees that they have the attention of Clint and Scott, too.

This hasn’t escaped Steve’s notice, who glances nervously at them before looking back at Sam. It doesn’t increase Sam’s confidence in him at all. “I… I’m not sure what you…” Steve trails off, and Sam sighs. 

He knows very well that Steve knows exactly what he wants, but he’s avoiding the topic. It’s not giving a good impression, already. “Why don’t we start from the beginning, then? All you’ve said so far is that Zemo got there before you and then Stark turned against you. So here’s a simple question, because we all made assumptions based on what you didn’t say, and I think it’s time you clarify for us. Did Stark get there intending to help you or not?”

Steve at least has the decency not to look away from Sam. “Yes. He came to help with the Winter Soldiers. But they were already dead.”

“You told us that already,” Sam says with a nod. “What I want to know is how Stark went from helping you to attacking you.”

There’s a pause, but Steve still doesn’t look away. “Zemo got there first. He was waiting for us. He never intended to release the other Soldiers at all—it was all a trap for us, so he could turn us against each other, and he succeeded.”

“How?” Clint says impatiently, asking the question that none of them even bothered with before. Seems he’s invested now, too, wanting to know the details he hadn’t considered important back when he’d been cursing Stark’s name.

“There was a video,” Steve says, voice going soft, “of one of the Winter Soldier’s missions. Zemo made us watch it.”

“And, what, then Stark attacked you?” Clint says, but Sam speaks again before Steve can answer that.

“What mission, Steve? What did the Winter Soldier do that would have made Stark go after Barnes?”

Steve’s still looking at Sam, but everything in his body language says he wants to turn away. Guilt, shame, deceit. Sam’s seen it all before in his days as a counselor. “It was his parents,” he finally says.

For a moment, Sam thinks he means Zemo’s parents, or even Barnes’s own, and he’s horrified, but he doesn’t understand what that has to do with Stark. But then Scott speaks up again. “The Starks died in a car crash.”

Steve shakes his head, and Sam understands with an awful, twisted feeling. He might throw up. “It was HYDRA,” Steve says in practically a whisper. “They wanted something Howard had, and they sent the Winter Soldier to get it. He shot out the tires on the car.”

“So he caused the crash that killed them,” Sam says, horrified, but Steve shakes his head again, swallowing visibly.

“They… they were still alive, after the crash. And—”

“And he murdered them,” Clint finishes grimly, as much horror in his voice as Sam feels.

Sam makes a choked noise and Steve’s eyes, which had gone to Clint, snap back to him. “You’re saying he watched it on _video_? Barnes murdering his _parents_?”

“It wasn’t Bucky!” Steve says immediately. “Tony shouldn’t have attacked him!”

“So what?” Sam counters, and Steve looks shocked at that. “Maybe it wasn’t Barnes’s choice, but he was still the one that did it. Are you really going to tell me that Stark should have thought logically, the moment he found out his parents were murdered, the moment he _watched_ it? Come on, Steve. That’s not how human reactions work and you know it.” He’s getting that numb feeling again, hearing Steve really defend this, try to condemn Stark for reacting like any human being would to something so traumatic.

“But we knew Barnes was innocent already,” Clint says hesitantly. He shrinks back when Sam turns to face him, eyes narrowed.

“Are you really going to tell me that if it was you standing there, watching a video of him killing Laura, or your kids, you’d have just said ‘oh, that’s okay, Barnes was brainwashed. It’s all fine?’ Don’t lie to yourself, Clint. What would you really have done if it was you?”

Clint looks between Sam and Steve and then down at the ground. “I’d have killed him. Doesn’t matter if he wasn’t himself. If he killed my kids and I watched it… I’d kill him.”

Steve flinches back from that and Sam can’t help but watch him incredulously. Did he really expect another answer? Is he really that stubborn, that blinded by his need to protect Barnes, that he’s refusing to let other people react like _people_?

It prompts another question from Sam. “So Stark went after Barnes because of that video. He watched something traumatic and he attacked the guy who did it—guilty or not,” he adds, seeing Steve open his mouth to interrupt with protests again. “But you were there too, Steve. You didn’t hold him back? Talk him down, get between them? You didn’t keep him from hitting Barnes?” God. He’s really beginning to question everything about the Avengers, and to see what Stark was talking about, those times that he called them “untrained” and said they were essentially vigilantes. Shouldn’t a so-called superhero, someone who goes into international conflicts and helps to solve serious, world-ending problems, at least have some basic training in conflict resolution? He should have known how to hold Stark back without escalating the situation.

This time, Steve does look away, and that can’t mean anything good. “He—he technically hit me first.”

It’s Scott who steps forward this time, right to the bars of his cell, arms crossed defensively and eyes narrowed. “Why would he hit _you_ first? Because you got between them?”

Eyes on the floor, Steve mumbles, “Because he asked me if I knew.”

“If you—if you knew? As in, if you knew about the Starks?” Clint asks, voice rising. “And what did you say?”

Steve doesn’t answer, but Sam knows. He takes a horrified step back. “You knew,” he says, and when Steve finally meets his eyes again, he knows that it’s true. “You knew about it, and you didn’t tell Stark. How long have you known?”

“Since D.C.,” Steve says, and Clint makes an outraged noise beside him. “We weren’t absolutely sure, but something Zola said to me and Natasha—”

“So you both knew,” Sam says, and his voice is tight and flat with fury. “You’ve both known for—for _years_ now, and you never told Stark.”

“What the fuck,” Clint says, also stepping back. “What—what the _fuck_.”

“That’s not just shitty,” Scott says, “that’s breaking the law. It’s obstruction of justice. You knew about a murder and you didn’t say anything.”

“They were right,” Sam says before Steve can respond to Scott, “you betrayed him. He never lied to me at all. He went there to help a friend, and you betrayed him, and then you beat him down, and you came back and _lied_ to us. You lied to us like you lied to him.” He’s not sure what he’d feel at the guilty, defeated look on Steve’s face, if he were feeling anything inside but a numb sort of cold. “What else did you lie to us about, Steve?”

He’s not sure he wants an answer. Steve opens his mouth anyway, but nothing comes out for a few seconds. The awful silence stretches on. “Sam—” Steve finally manages.

“Shut up,” Clint snaps. “Just shut the fuck up, Steve.” He’s turned away from both of them now, toward the far corner of his cell. His hands are in his hair, gripping it like he’s on the verge of breaking down. Sam wonders what he’s thinking about. If he’s realizing what a stupid move it was to blindly trust Steve and get involved in this fight. After all, Stark was right, earlier. Clint wouldn’t be here at all if he hadn’t jumped at Steve’s call. 

But Sam doesn’t have any right to judge. He followed Steve blindly, too. He condemned Stark without all the facts, without any of the facts, really, and why was that, again? Because he trusted Steve. Captain America, the virtuous, righteous guy, the golden boy, always standing up for what’s right. And Sam’s work with the Avengers was always with Steve, Natasha, and Wanda, who never missed an opportunity to throw Stark under the bus, to talk about his ego and his arrogance, and to bring up every one of his mistakes. Sam had been biased against him from the beginning, and by the time the Accords came up… he’s mortified to admit to himself that he didn’t bother thinking for himself. He trusted Steve, he didn’t trust Stark. It was that simple.

He’ll be cursing himself for that for a long time—assuming they live that long. He can’t forget, in the midst of all these revelations, that they’re in a HYDRA prison and in deep shit. That their best chance at escape—it would be another stupid mistake to try to deny that Stark is the most likely to figure a way out of here—just got dragged off for who knows what awful shit. And now the trust between the remaining members of his team is thoroughly broken. He can’t trust Steve. He can’t trust his own judgment. Can he even really trust anyone in this room? Is this what HYDRA wanted?

Sam doesn’t know what to do. He’s exhausted and unsure of himself. He mostly just feels numb right now, but beneath that is a nauseating mix of guilt, fear, and uncertainty. He has no idea where they are or how to get out. He backs up until his back hits the one solid wall of his cell, and he slides to the floor, defeated.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s silent for quite a while after Clint’s last demand that Steve shut up. Sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, head in his hands and with nothing to do but think, Sam starts to really feel it. He’s not sure how long they were out, how long it’s been since they were taken—and by extension, since they ate or drank anything, or got any sleep—but he can feel how dry his mouth is now that he’s stopped talking, and his stomach is twisting in on itself from more than just guilt and anger now.

He’s not completely sure whether he’s glad for the silence or not. The counselor in him knows that he’s still angry, that everyone here is now, and that starting up more conversations would lead nowhere good. They all need time to process the recent revelations and think on their own before they try to come together. And the logical part of him knows that as important as this new information is, they’re still in a HYDRA prison and in a lot of trouble, and they need to stay alert and focused. There’s been a lot of emotional damage already in a short period; any more and they’ll be easy pickings for HYDRA in any manner.

Still, it’s hard not to let his swirling thoughts just cycle in anger and sadness and guilt and disbelief. He’s… he doesn’t know what to think. There are so many things going on, so many things he’s learned and unlearned. He doesn’t want to be alone with his thoughts right now, but he has no choice.

And underneath all of that is a simmering guilt over any self-pity, because surely whatever’s happening to Stark right now is worse than anything Sam’s going through. What right does he have to sit here and lament his situation when Stark is enduring torture? How can he sit here and feel sorry for the things he’s suddenly learned, when those problems have been Stark’s all along?

He knows he’s letting himself get into a cycle that’s not good for him. He can’t do anything to change the past. It’s not his fault that he didn’t know until now about Stark and Steve’s betrayal (except it is, isn’t it, his fault that he didn’t ask, that he didn’t question the dozens of signs that Steve wasn’t being truthful), and dwelling on it now, blaming himself and Steve and everyone who was involved, is not doing him any favors.

But there’s nothing to do except think for hours of uncomfortable silence, and try as he might to distract himself with other thoughts, he keeps coming back to what just happened. He isn’t in the best place right now, physically or mentally, to be introspective, and his thoughts are less self-reflection and more pointless self-recrimination and pity. An endless loop of misery. Unsure if he’s happy or not that at least for now, Steve and the others are staying quiet. If they were to restart the argument from before or start discussing Stark or Siberia or the Accords in any way, Sam knows he’d feel compelled to join them, and he also knows that wouldn’t be a good idea right now.

It’s definitely been hours, though Sam’s not sure how many, when the door opens again. It’s just the regular agents this time, Daniel isn’t with them, which Sam supposes is a good thing. Two of them have once again got Stark under the arms, and though he’s not completely limp, his head is down and they’re dragging him more than he’s walking under his own power. Sam would hazard a guess that he’s barely conscious—that or faking it, trying to seem weaker than he really is, though to what end Sam wouldn’t know. It’s not like Stark would have a chance against five armed guards.

Sam revises that thought and concludes that he’s definitely not faking it when the guards reopen his cell, drag him inside, and dump him carelessly on the ground. Stark falls when they let go of him, and though he gets his hands down in front of him in time to stop his face from hitting the floor, it’s a near thing. He stays still where he lands, head down and lying on the floor.

Sam and the others, who’d all—with the exception of Steve—been sitting on the floor of their cells for the past few hours, had jumped up when the door had reopened, but now Sam goes to the edge of his cell that adjoins Stark’s and crouches down to his level. “Hey. Are you okay?” Sam asks gently, though he cringes a little as soon as it comes out of his mouth—of course Stark’s not okay.

Stark doesn’t answer him, but in the silence now that the guards have left, Sam can hear his panting breaths. Finally, after a few long moments, Stark shifts and pushes himself back into a sitting position on the floor. His head comes up enough that Sam can finally see his face—and let out a breath of relief when it at least appears normal, no savage marks or parts cut off, any of the horrors he was envisioning—but he stares at the floor, not looking up at Sam or anyone else. Sam examines what he can see of Stark and doesn’t see any blood on him, but he knows very well that the best kinds of torture don’t leave many marks, and Stark is moving like he’s in pain.

“Can I do anything?” Sam tries, but again, Stark ignores him. After a few seconds of restless shifting and a tightening of his features that says suppressed pain to Sam, Stark turns and manages a half-crawl across the floor of his cell to the very corner, between the two concrete walls of his cell and farthest from Sam or anyone else. He curls up protectively, wraps his arms around his legs and puts his chin on his knees, and stares blankly ahead.

“Tony,” comes Steve’s voice from his cell, and Sam doesn’t think it’s a good sign that Stark doesn’t react at all to Steve addressing him, not like before, “what happ—”

“Shut up,” Sam interrupts sharply, and Steve falls silent. “You don’t deserve to ask that.” There’s that anger coming out again. The hours alone with his thoughts weren’t enough to cool it, it seems. But it’s not just that that makes Sam say it. Even if Stark were up to talking right now—which, judging by his continued blank stare and complete lack of reaction to Steve’s voice, Sam’s concern, or Sam’s anger, he isn’t—it wouldn’t be fair to ask him to relive whatever the hell just happened to him. Not only that, but it’s likely they’re being monitored by HYDRA in the cells. If they start talking about whatever just happened, they could compromise themselves.

“Sam…” Steve’s voice behind him is quiet and sad. “I’m sorry.”

The flare of anger and resentment isn’t as strong as he’d have thought. Now that Stark is back in his sight, it feels like a tension that’s been keeping him going subconsciously is draining away, leaving him empty and exhausted. “Steve, just… leave me alone.” And miraculously, he does.

Sam tries a few more times to get Stark to talk to him, or even acknowledge him, but nothing he says produces so much as a flicker in that dead-eyed stare. Eventually, Sam gives up and retreats back to his resting place at the back of his cell. He can’t stop himself from still watching Stark, though. As if he could do anything if Stark’s condition changes.

It’s another long, painful wait before there’s movement from Stark. Sam jerks at the sight, ready to run over to the bars and try to talk, or help, or whatever he can do, but it’s just Stark putting his head down on his knees and closing his eyes. The curled up position doesn’t waver and makes it hard to judge, but Sam’s pretty sure he falls asleep like that. Sam doesn’t doubt he needs the rest, but he finds it surprising that anyone, much less a billionaire who’s probably never slept on anything less than a thousand dollar mattress in his life, could fall asleep in that position, on a hard concrete floor and pressed against a cold wall. 

Belatedly, Sam remembers Stark’s very publicized foray to Afghanistan and internally takes back the thought about him never sleeping anywhere uncomfortable. Is this what Sam’s biases have done to him, made him jump to uncharitable thoughts and judge a man, however briefly, who’s just been through hell? Suddenly he wonders if he has any right at all to be telling Steve to leave Stark alone. He’s not sure he isn’t just as bad. Maybe that’s why Stark won’t react to any of them—he’s among enemies here as much as he was with Daniel and the HYDRA agents.

A while after Stark puts his head down, Steve speaks up again. “Is he asleep?” 

Sam fights the urge to tell him to shut his mouth again, and finds himself contemplating why he’d ever thought Steve’s well-known stubbornness was a good thing, but at least Steve has the decency to keep his voice quiet. “Yeah, so don’t wake him up,” Sam says, and it comes out less annoyed and more tired than he was going for.

There’s a pause, and then Steve says, “Tony’s people will be looking for us. Rhodes, Vision. They would have been in contact with the suit, probably had surveillance on the plane. They’ll know what happened. They’ll be looking.”

It comes without his trademark bold confidence, maybe because of his teammates’ anger at him, maybe because he himself doesn’t really believe it. Whatever the reason, Sam is having a hard time believing it either. Anyone good enough to take Stark in the first place must be smart enough to hide him well. Whatever it is they’re doing here, HYDRA’s being careful about it. There’s been no egotistical declaration of plans, no chances to escape, no dastardly plots they’re in the middle of.

And that’s the scariest part, Sam thinks. An elaborate plan means there are chances for things to go wrong. The more carefully plotted each step is, the easier it is to throw a wrench in one of them by doing the unexpected. But the best—or worst, for them—kind of plan is one that’s executed without fanfare, one that’s adaptable and quiet, and that seems to be exactly what they’re in the middle of now. They’ve been effectively contained. They haven’t been told what, exactly, HYDRA’s after, and now they’ve already sown distrust and anger amongst themselves. So yeah, Stark’s people will be looking for him, and by extension, the rest of them. But it doesn’t seem like depending on them for rescue will end well. If they can’t get themselves out of this, he wonders how hopeless it really is.

Contemplating all of this is making Sam’s head hurt, and his thoughts just seem to get worse and worse. He can feel exhaustion dragging his eyelids down, and though he’s on a hard floor and in danger and anything could happen any minute, he falls into an uneasy sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

Sam sleeps warily, but soundly enough that he’s surprised into a violent awakening when the door to their prison squeals open again. He’s up before he’s fully awake, on his feet with his fists raised, like that will make any difference. It takes him a few moments to remember where he is and what’s happening, and by that time the HYDRA agents are back in the room, followed by a smirking Daniel.

Steve is already up and at the bars of his cell, looking fully awake either by virtue of super soldier serum or because he was already up before the door opened. Sam’s still blinking sleep out of his eyes and remembering everything that happened yesterday—assuming that it’s now the next day, the lack of natural light or a way to tell time in their prison makes it hard to tell and it’s already getting to him—when Steve glares at Daniel and says aggressively, “What do you want?”

Daniel smiles. “Good morning to you too, Captain. I hope you enjoyed the accommodations last night.” His eyes travel over each of them again and Sam has to fight not to look away. Sleeping on a cold floor was just one of the irksome and slightly humiliating predicaments forced on them by this prison. Years in the military should have erased any of Sam’s self-conscious feelings about something like it, but still, finally giving in and using his “toilet” had been embarrassing. Even in the military they’d had _some_ privacy. He’d never been in a prison of any kind before, and knowing they were most likely being watched by HYDRA didn’t help. 

“What do you want?” Steve stubbornly repeats, and this time Daniel doesn’t even look at him. 

“Nothing from you, Captain. You’ve served your purpose. However, I believe it’s time to resume our little activities.” At his words, the guards move back to Stark’s cell.

Sam, Scott, and Steve are instantly at the edges of their cells, shouting protests, not that it makes any difference. Stark is awake, though he’s still on the floor. He’s uncurled from his tightly protective position and is holding himself tense and wary, but he hasn’t made a move to actually get up. Sam wonders if he’s in too much pain, or just wants to make the guards work for it, however little effort it is for them.

The agents don’t seem to care, either about Stark’s position or the others’ yelling. They seize Stark under the arms once again and haul him to his feet. The resigned look is back on his face, Sam sees, with some of yesterday’s defiance already erased. They march him out of the room again without a word, and this time Daniel doesn’t even bother to turn and look back at them before leaving too. They truly don’t seem to care about anything but their “volunteer.”

Sam curses and gives the bars another kick anyway, angry at himself, at HYDRA, at Steve, at the world. He curses himself for any brief relief he’d felt when they’d brought Stark back yesterday. Had he really been stupid enough to think that was it? Or that Steve would be given another chance, after their revelations about Siberia and Stark, to pick someone else? 

Maybe Sam had been, perhaps selfishly, hoping for a chance to go himself. To feel like he could somehow make something up to Stark by going in his place. But it seems like that chance will never come. They’re not going to rotate their victims, not until Stark is dead, at least. The thought fills Sam with dread and panic that have little to do with the possibility of him being next after Stark is killed, and everything to do with Stark himself dying before they can talk though this, before Sam can apologize to him for everything that’s happened, everything he’s done and not done. He’s ashamed to admit to himself that before all of this, before Steve had revealed the true depth of his betrayal, Sam would barely have felt anything at the thought of Stark’s death.

They all slump back to the floors or walls of their cells in defeat after the door closes, all probably thinking some version of the same thing. Sam can’t help but notice that Clint didn’t bother protesting against Stark being taken again, but then again, Clint really hasn’t said anything except the occasional “shut the fuck up” to Steve since everything went down yesterday. He’s sitting at the back of his cell now, back to Steve and Sam, silent. Sam does feel some kind of pity for the man—he doesn’t seem like the type to philosophize, normally, instead preferring to find someone to trust and then depend on them to validate the moral aspects of what he does. He’s been betrayed before, lost a lot of his ability to trust after SHIELD fell. Steve had been a constant through that, and realizing now that he’s been lied to again can’t be easy.

It feels like it’s been maybe an hour when the door opens again, and Sam jumps to his feet eagerly, hoping they’re bringing Stark back. Worried, at the same time, that it’s been so short a time, that the only reason they’d be bringing him back so soon would be that they’d injured him badly, or already killed him. But the rollercoaster of emotions comes to an abrupt halt when he sees it’s just one agent, holding a plastic bag.

Sam takes a shaky breath, hoping the agent can’t see it. He’s been on so many ups and downs already that it’s wearing on him. The agent comes silently into the room, reaches into the bag, and tosses something he pulls out of it into Steve’s cell. Steve bends down to snatch it before it can hit the ground, but he doesn’t look at it. “Where’s Tony?” he demands, but the agent ignores him, already moving to Clint’s cell. He repeats the same gesture for each of them; when he gets to Sam, Sam sees he’s tossing a plastic water bottle and two packets of something, presumably food, at each of them.

Steve continues trying to interrogate the agent about Stark’s whereabouts and is summarily ignored. The agent empties the bag and goes back to the door, pauses at the threshold, and turns back to them. Sam can see Steve move forward eagerly like he’s expecting information about Stark, and a small, bitter part of Sam can’t help but inwardly scoff at the movement. “Wrappers in the bottle, bottle in front of the cage,” the agent instructs gruffly. “You don’t give it back, you don’t get anything tomorrow.” He turns and leaves, slamming the door shut behind him.

Steve sighs and Sam lets out a tense breath of his own, sitting back down with his prizes. He examines the packets—beef jerky and a plain granola bar, not exactly favorites of his but it’s not stupid on their part, they cover protein and grains and will keep them alive for a while—and wonders whether he should just eat them now. From what the agent said, they’d better be finished by some arbitrary time that they come back to collect the trash, so Sam shrugs and rips open the jerky, finishing it all and then downing half the water bottle. He’ll wait a few minutes before consuming the rest.

He looks around and sees that the others are doing the same thing, each absorbed in their food and their thoughts. When they’ve all finished, there’s nothing to do but wait, and it grates on them.

The day passes by agonizingly slowly. Sam and Clint spend a lot of it pacing in their cells. Scott mostly just sits at the back of his, quiet and reserved. Steve paces for a while too, sits, gets back up and paces again. He can’t seem to sit still or to move for prolonged periods of time. He tries halfheartedly to formulate a plan, to talk about escaping, or to reassure them that there are people looking for them. His plans go nowhere; it’s obvious he has nothing. Eventually, Clint once again tells him to shut up, and he does. 

After a few hours, Steve tries yelling for Daniel and the agents, demanding they come back and talk to him, that they give Stark back, that they come and fight him. Sam is nearly struck by the urge to roll his eyes at some of it, but he’s mostly just tired. Maybe this is HYDRA’s method of torturing the rest of them—to ignore them.

When Steve gets tired of yelling, he begins attacking the bars of his cell. He strains at them, he tries kicking them, he punches them until his knuckles bleed. Sam knows the wounds will heal quickly, but he still winces seeing them, and eventually shouts for Steve to stop. Steve does stop, panting, turning to Sam with a lost expression. “It’s not going to do any good,” Sam says, and he wants to turn away from the turmoil in Steve’s eyes. “It won’t bring Stark back any sooner.”

“I can’t—” Steve starts, but he doesn’t finish the thought, instead slumping onto the floor of his cell and putting his face in his hands. Clint scoffs from his cell, and he doesn’t need to say what he’s thinking out loud for Sam to get it. They’re all already at each other’s throats and it’s only been a day.

Sam can’t stand seeing it. The guilt that had been buried under anger yesterday is back. However pissed he’d been at Steve, for his choice and for the things he’s done in the past… Steve’s still a good guy at heart. A good guy who makes stupid choices, sure, but isn’t that exactly what he’d thought of Stark before, when he’d condemned him? 

The problem, Sam thinks, is that he’d put Steve on a pedestal, and so had most of the world. In his absence, Steve had been turned into an idol, an exemplar of everything good and right, and there’s no way the real thing could ever have lived up to that. No person is perfect in reality, but they’d all expected it of Steve. Worse, they’d let Steve expect it of himself.

And now… whatever Sam’s problems with the choice he made yesterday, it’s not as though Steve is heartless. He’s clearly upset about it now, and yet his entire team is turning against him. Sam helped to facilitate that yesterday, and now he’s wishing he hadn’t been so harsh. If they want any hope of getting out of here, they can’t be attacking each other like this.

So he takes a deep breath and leans against the bars, looking over at Steve where he sits. “Steve, look.” Steve’s eyes rise to meet his, and Sam can see the hurt in them. “I’m sorry, about what I said yesterday. I—shouldn’t have been so fast to judge you. I can’t imagine being put in that situation and asked to make a choice like that. I shouldn’t have judged you like that. I’m sorry.” He resists the urge to make excuses, or to tell Steve that he’s still pissed about Siberia and intends to have words about it later. That’s not what this is about, and tempering an apology with more blame just erases the sincerity of the apology. He knows that. So he swallows the still-simmering anger and he lets his sorry hang in the air.

There’s a look on Steve’s face that Sam can’t quite decipher. His mouth opens again like he wants to say something, but then his features twist into a pained expression and he ducks his head, settling for just a quiet “thanks.”

It hasn’t fixed everything, maybe not even anything. There’s still tension between them where there wasn’t before, and there’s still a lot more to say. But Sam feels a little better… and he hopes Steve does too.

It’s silent for hours more after that. Scott and Clint don’t offer their own apologies, or their thoughts on Sam’s. Steve moves back to sit against the wall of his cell, and eventually Clint starts pacing again, but none of them say anything more. At least Sam’s thoughts aren’t quite as unhappy this time around.

With nothing to do, Sam falls into a light doze, but he’s once again jolted awake by the door opening. He has a fleeting thought that maybe HYDRA has avoided oiling the damn door hinges on purpose just to screw with them, or to make for a more ominous sound. How clichéd. 

The entire group of guards is back this time, minus Daniel once more, dragging Stark. The man looks like he’s stubbornly holding onto consciousness; there’s blood on his face and bruises starting to form on his arms where they’re exposed past his short sleeves. Sam’s gut twists just looking at him.

When the guards dump him in his cell and leave, Stark lands hard on his knees, then pitches forward. He manages to stop his head from hitting the floor again, but lowers it onto his hands a moment later like he just can’t hold it up. His eyes are squeezed shut and Sam can see that he’s trembling, either with pain or the cold of the room and his single layers. 

Sam sits back and pulls off his own jacket. He has two more layers on underneath it, and even if he didn’t, Stark needs it more than he does right now. HYDRA stripped them all of everything loose, useful or not, while they were unconscious, but at least they left them all their clothes. Most of them were wearing multiple layers on the cool plane, but it looks like Stark was only wearing a t-shirt and the thin pants of his flight suit underneath the armor.

Sam reaches through the bars with the jacket in hand. He can’t quite reach Stark, but he manages to swing it a bit and half drape it over Stark where he’s lying on the floor of his cell. There’s no reaction for a minute, but then a lightly shaking hand comes up to clutch at the collar of the jacket, pull it tighter around him, and as terrible as the situation is, Sam can’t help but feel a small glow of satisfaction at the thought that he’s done _something_ to help.

After a few more minutes of silent stillness, Stark moves, pushing himself up again. He sits up gingerly, wincing like he did last night, but instead of moving back to the corner where he slept last night, he moves toward the bars dividing his and Sam’s cells.

Sam is surprised, but he tries not to show it. If Stark is coming over to let Sam try to look over any of his injuries, or try to pass information quietly enough that they won’t be heard by HYDRA, or even just to share body heat, Sam will happily do it. He sits back a bit and waits for Stark to come to him like he’s dealing with an easily frightened animal, and silently berates himself for the comparison. Whatever he’s been through in the last two days, Stark is still a genius and a forward thinker—whatever he’s doing, it’s with a purpose.

Or maybe not. Instead of reaching for Sam or moving to sit close to him, Stark pulls the jacket off his shoulders with one bruised hand and shoves it back through the bars and into Sam’s cell, staring hard at it the entire time instead of at Sam. He drops it, and before Sam can do or say anything, turns to make his way back into the far corner of his cell, curling up just like before, this time with his eyes closed.

Infuriatingly, embarrassingly, Sam has to hold his breath to keep tears back. He’s sure the stress of the situation and of being tired and hungry and cold is contributing, but right now the thought that Stark doesn’t even trust him enough to accept the simplest gesture, that Sam has betrayed him thoroughly enough that he’d reject that offering, is killing him a little.

Clint, who’s been watching from his own cell, mumbles something about being ungrateful.

“Shut the fuck up,” Sam says, more sharply than he maybe intended, but Clint does shut up. It isn’t Stark’s fault they’ve all made him feel like he can’t trust a single one of them. Sam forces himself to close his eyes and take a deep breath, then picks the jacket up and hangs it over his own shoulders, though he doesn’t bother putting his arms in the sleeves. Maybe it’s in case Stark changes his mind, or maybe it’s just because right now, Sam doesn’t feel like he deserves the comfort. Not after he’s been a part of the betrayals that are keeping Stark wary of them all.

And Sam thinks with a wave of despair about just how deep that betrayal is. Stark was fighting for the team, for the future, when he worked with the Accords, and they all turned their backs on him. Even after that, after the fight in Germany, after Sam was—however indirectly—responsible for Rhodes’s injury, and after what they all said to him on the Raft, Stark was still willing to go to Siberia to help Steve and Barnes. Only to be betrayed yet again, in just about the worst way Sam can imagine, and beaten down.

And Stark still fought for their pardons, Sam suddenly realizes. After all that, he worked to bring them home. They were going to have to work together again. He was willing to work alongside Steve, the man who called himself a friend and betrayed him—and Sam suddenly remembers all the missions to find Barnes that they undertook on Stark’s dime, and the entire time, it turns out Steve knew what Barnes had done and was keeping it from him. Even after all of that, Stark was willing to work alongside the man whose hands ended his parents’ lives, and the “friend” who’d lied to him and covered it up.

And after all of that, after every sacrifice Stark already made for the sake of the rest of them… Steve repaid him by volunteering him for torture. A civilian, a baseline human with no military or SHIELD training, but with a bad past with torture and probable PTSD to go along with it. What the fuck was wrong with him?

These new thoughts almost make Sam regret apologizing to Steve earlier, but… he can’t. If it’s to keep the team together, to keep them focused on the problem at hand instead of blaming each other and tearing each other down, he’ll do whatever it takes. He can talk out his anger at Steve later. And… he knows Steve isn’t malicious, he’s not absolutely deplorable, he must have had reasons for doing what he did that made sense in his own head. Even if they were selfish and cruel. Maybe that does make him condemnable—maybe Sam’s just trying to make excuses because he still doesn’t want to believe that Steve could be so wrong.

He’s just… so tired. Emotionally more than physically, though he hasn’t exactly gotten good sleep in his cell. Yet another high and low for the day—feeling like he was helping Stark only for Stark to reject his gesture—has left him even more exhausted than before. He wants to watch Stark carefully for any change, maybe try again to offer help, or attempt to think of a plan or a way out of here. But instead, he leans back against the wall and falls asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

The next morning begins pretty much the same way. Sam’s asleep and leaning against the wall when the door opens, and today he’s on his feet and ready quickly. He’s not sure whether he should be glad or not that he’s already used to his situation, enough that he doesn’t have the initial confusion of yesterday on waking up. He’s also resigned to the fact that they’ll all be ignored except Stark, with the possible exception of a taunt from Daniel.

He’s exactly right. Daniel is wearing his usual sharp suit and sharper smile; Sam wants nothing more than to smack it right off his face. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says cheerily. “I hope you’ve had a… productive few days. Insightful, I’m sure.”

Not that he wasn’t already highly suspicious, but now Sam’s sure that HYDRA is listening in on them, probably watching them too. It sounds like they already knew about Siberia and what Steve has done to Stark, and after all, Steve chose Stark to be the sacrifice right in front of them, so none of the earlier revelations were a surprise to them, Sam’s sure. Still, it throws him off, gives him a slimy feeling to know that they were probably playing right into HYDRA’s hands by fighting with each other. Yet, at the same time, it’s not like they were fighting over nothing. He still has legitimate reasons to be angry at Steve, they all do, and just because HYDRA’s watching doesn’t mean they can’t be angry. But the confirmation that Daniel is listening in to their conversations makes Sam glad that he apologized to Steve yesterday. If they appear to be tighter knit and more mentally stable than they really are it might throw Daniel off.

It doesn’t stop the sting, though, at the realization that HYDRA was counting on this. That they knew not only that Steve had betrayed Stark, but that he’d lied to his team about it. By taunting him about it and provoking Sam into forcing a confession from Steve, HYDRA had played them against each other the same way Zemo had turned Stark and Steve against each other in Siberia. And both times, it was because of Steve’s lies, Steve’s deceptions. And because Sam—and Stark—had failed to see through those lies.

It hurts. It hurts his pride, his judgment, his heart. He can bet it hurt Stark a hell of a lot more.

Stark’s in the same position as yesterday, sitting on the floor in his corner but uncurled from his defensively tight position. Watching the agents with weary resignation, and not resisting as they enter his cell and pull him up. Steve shouts at them again when they take Stark away, and Scott gives a halfhearted protest. Even Clint, watching silently from his cell, looks uncomfortable. By now Sam knows it’s useless to protest, and he stays quiet, just watching Stark. 

“Hey! Leave him! Take me, you hear me? Take me instead!” Steve yells, thrusting his arm through the bars and trying to grab one of the guards as they pass by, but they sidestep him easily. Daniel actually looks at him this time, but all he does is laugh and shake his head, as though Steve is an amusing toy. He probably is, to those HYDRA bastards.

Steve lets out a roar of frustration when the door closes behind them and kicks at his bars again, a hell of a lot harder than the two times Sam has. Sam wouldn’t be surprised if Steve just broke a couple toes doing it, but Steve doesn’t even wince. He just wraps his hands around the bars and pulls with all his might.

They don’t budge, not a centimeter, but Steve keeps pulling until his face turns red and then pale. When he finally lets go with an explosive breath, he staggers, and Sam know he just strained until he nearly passed out. But he just puts his hand to his head for a minute, takes a few deep breaths, and starts the whole thing over again.

He does it three times before someone finally says something; Scott, this time. “Come on, stop,” he says after Steve staggers again, more pronounced than before. Sam looks over and sees that Scott’s head is turned away like he can’t stand to watch the display. “It’s not doing any good and you know it. Knocking yourself out won’t get us out of here any faster.”

It seems the reminder that they should be looking for an escape is enough to persuade Steve to stop. He bites his lip and nods, but instead of sitting down, he starts moving all around his cell, examining every single bar from top to bottom, looking for every tiny crack in the cement. 

It’s just repetition, Sam knows, and he wonders if it’s making Steve feel any better. They’ve all already done this, gone over every inch of their respective cells looking for weaknesses, and unsurprisingly, finding none. Still, the motions from Steve, combined with the frustration of completely lacking any ideas, sets Sam pacing again.

He stops briefly when the agent comes in to collect their empty bottles and give them more food and water. He doesn’t want them to see him pacing restlessly, hopelessly. Even though he knows they’re being watched, it still feels different somehow to show that weakness face to face. But as soon as the agent leaves, he’s back to it.

He paces fast enough and for long enough that he actually works up a sweat despite the persistent chill of their prison, shrugging off his jacket for a while. Clint gets up and paces too, occasionally mumbling to himself, and once or twice Scott sits up like he’s heard something on the other side of the door, but he always falls back after a few seconds, disappointed. The entire day stretches on with nothing more exciting happening than Steve nearly making himself pass out.

When they drag Stark back that night—assuming it’s night—Sam counts it among small victories that he doesn’t really look much worse than yesterday. There are new bruises coming up on what skin is showing, his lip is split and bleeding, and the lines on his face are more pronounced than ever, but he’s still conscious, at least. He drops the same way as yesterday and the guards leave without a word, as usual.

Sam glances at his abandoned jacket and debates for a moment. Finally, shrugging to himself, he grabs it and reaches through the bars again, tossing it over Stark. Stark briefly pulls it around himself just like yesterday, but then gets up and moves back to the bars to shove it back through again. His eyes come up to meet Sam’s for the first time since they got here—which makes it the first time in months, now that he thinks about it—and Sam can see the frustration in his gaze. He still says nothing.

Sam swallows back his own frustration and the comment that wants to come from it. It won’t do anyone any good, and after the things he’s come to understand over the last two days, he can hardly blame Stark for not trusting him or for rejecting his help. Still, it hurts, and it’s hard to watch. He’s not asking for trust or friendship, just offering something simple, and rejection of that bothers him.

He sits and wallows in his own frustration for a while, instead of watching Stark like he usually does. He hates this, everything about it. Being captured, caged like animals, and barely fed enough to survive, and his own guilt and his anger over everything that’s happened and everything he’s learned. He hates the contradiction of his sympathy for Steve, who’s obviously torn up about what’s happening to Stark, but at the same time, the cold knowledge that Steve’s the one who put Stark in this position and being sorry won’t change that. On top of it all, Stark’s refusing to say a word to them, or even to look at them most of the time. Rejecting Sam’s attempts to help, pathetic as they are.

He snatches the jacket back, moves to the back of his cell in three quick steps, and sits down heavily, pulling the jacket back on. He finds himself wanting to fidget; there are too many thoughts crammed into his head and that little bit of movement wasn’t enough to curb his restlessness. A glance over to the left shows that Stark is back in his corner, curled up in his usual position, though not as tightly as the previous few nights, and he winces when he shifts around.

Sam’s annoyance with him—what little there is—drains away at the sight. He can’t judge Stark’s actions or thought processes right now. Who knows what the hell HYDRA is doing to him every day. He’s compromised, physically and emotionally, in the middle of ongoing trauma, and expecting him to act rationally or to think logically enough to accept help from a known enemy—as much as it hurts Sam to cast himself in that role—is no better than Steve, expecting him to put emotion aside like a machine in Siberia.

His frustration replaced by resolve, Sam is determined to keep this routine going, even if Stark continually rejects his help. Even if he won’t talk to him or look at him. If Sam offers the same thing, every day, without stipulations, maybe Stark will eventually accept that it’s a friendly offer. Sam staunchly refuses to think about the parallels to coaxing a feral animal into eating from an offered hand.

The next morning is the same. They’re forming a routine, and though it’s only been four days, Sam is already thinking that this alone could drive him insane. Being in this room day after day, with no sense of time except for when they come to take Stark away, bring food, and bring Stark back, is disorienting. None of the guards talk to them, or even acknowledge them, and even Daniel doesn’t say anything this morning when they come for Stark. They’re still not talking to each other. 

Steve seems cowed by Clint’s attitude towards him, and even Sam’s despite his apology. Sam can’t help but think, as much as he wants to try to empathize with Steve and keep them together, that Steve’s continued silence is just a sign that he doesn’t have anything more to say on the subject. He has no real justifications for what he did to Stark, or why he lied to the rest of them, other than pure selfishness and an inability to see anything past Barnes. Sam thinks, suddenly, that he knows what it would feel like if Steve had chosen him for torture over the others, because it’s already happened. Steve let them all become fugitives, give up everything they had, because he only cared about protecting Barnes. Steve let Sam drag his morality down to hell and hate Stark without all the facts, because Steve wanted to still look like the good guy. 

And now Sam’s trying to pin the blame for his own lack of insight on someone else. He forces himself to stop thinking about it, at least for the moment, putting his head in his hands and trying to just shut the world out. He’s too hungry and tired and stressed to think logically. 

The routines continue. They haul Stark back in and dump him in his cell—this time his head lands heavily on his arm and he stays still for a few minutes, breathing into the floor. Sam can’t see his face, but the tension in his muscles is enough to show he’s conscious and not doing great. 

Again, Sam reaches through the bars to toss the jacket over Stark. Again, Stark wraps it around himself, sits up, and his brows draw down like he’s confused about something. Sam doubts he’s delirious, but he’s clearly not in the best mental state. When he moves over to the bars to hand it back, something tightly wound snaps in Sam. Every promise he made to himself earlier about keeping his patience with Stark’s stubborn refusals vanishes in an instant.

“Just keep it, for fuck’s sake,” he says harshly, and he sees Clint’s head come up to watch them from across the aisleway. Thankfully, if Clint is thinking anything snarky about what Sam said to him the first time Stark refused the jacket, he’s smart enough to keep it to himself. Sam is not in the mood for it right now.

Stark just stares at him, hand still held out with the jacket but not letting it go, and Sam’s brief flare of anger is immediately extinguished by a wave of guilt. He opens his mouth to apologize, but nothing comes out. While he’s trying to figure out what to say, Stark gives him a long look, then pulls his arm back. He slowly puts the jacket on, not quite hiding a few tiny winces when he twists his shoulders back and when the sleeves rub over his exposed arms. It just heightens Sam’s guilt for snapping at him, but… at least he’s wearing it.

Stark doesn’t make eye contact with Sam again, instead moving silently back to his corner and curling up again. Maybe Sam’s imagining it, but he thinks, maybe, Stark looks marginally more comfortable than the last few nights. It’s hard to find any comfort in it, when Stark looks worse every day, but at least it’s something. At least Sam’s doing what little he can.

He falls asleep just a little bit faster than the previous nights.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully no one is getting bored with the “routine” poor Sam and Tony are falling into. I promise this is actually going somewhere soon in terms of plot.

Sam actually wakes up on his own before the HYDRA agents come back the next morning. Seems his sleep cycle is already reset to this new routine—that, or the discomfort of the creeping cold isn’t letting him sleep as long as he normally would. Wearing two more layers beneath it, Sam hadn’t realized how much warmth his jacket had been providing until now.

But it’s an easy trade-off. He’d gladly give up every bit of clothing he has if he thought Stark would take it; it’s the least he can do for the guy getting dragged off and tortured every day. And it makes him squirm to think about just how miserable it must have been for Stark the first few nights, already beaten and bruised and wearing nothing but his thin layers.

Sam looks over to Stark’s cell and sees that Stark is awake as well, once again staring off into the distance. Sam wonders how long he’s been awake, and how hard it must be to sleep with whatever injuries he has. The thoughts just reinforce how uncomfortable he must have been for the first few nights, and as much as Sam’s glad he’s doing something now, he recognizes that in light of everything that’s happening to Stark, a jacket is a pretty tiny positive.

Sam shifts out of the position he slept in, groaning softly as he stretches out muscles that are stiff from cold and from his prolonged time in the same uncomfortable position propped against the wall. At his movement, Stark’s eyes go to him. Sam tries to hold eye contact, opens his mouth to say something, but Stark looks away as soon as he sees that Sam’s attention is on him, and Sam shuts his mouth, disappointed.

Stark shifts with an ill-disguised wince, features tightening as he goes through the same stiff movements Sam had—but significantly slower, more cautiously, probably trying to avoid aggravating hidden injuries. Sam wants to cringe just watching him, the pain he’s in obvious. Slowly, Stark makes his way over to the bars dividing him and Sam, and Sam holds his breath, watching him come, wondering—maybe hoping—he’s looking for help, for something from Sam.

But when Stark gets near the bars, he sits back, too far for Sam to reach out and touch him. Then, still not looking up, he pulls Sam’s jacket off and moves forward with it in his hand. 

“No, keep it,” Sam says, voice a little rough from disuse. Stark doesn’t look up, still reaching out with the jacket. “You can keep it.”

Stark doesn’t shake his head or look up at Sam, but he reaches through the bars, and Sam knows he isn’t going to be able to get Stark to keep the thing. Reluctantly, he takes it back. He tries to reach out and make contact with Stark, even if it’s just a brush of their hands together. Something to let the man know he’s not completely alone, but as if Stark knows his intentions, he suddenly lets go and yanks his hand back before Sam can touch him. 

Sam pushes down the momentary flare of hurt and just watches Stark turn and move back to the back wall of his cell. Once he reaches it, Stark pushes himself shakily into a standing position. It’s the first time Sam’s seen him do it, and he wonders what’s changed. He rises as Stark does, balancing on the balls of his feet as though poised to run—where, he doesn’t know. He just knows there’s a tension in the air and he feels like he’s waiting for something.

There’s a loud bang on the door a moment later, and then it squeals open. Right. Stark must have either made a lucky guess or he has a better sense of time than Sam. Instead of watching the agents coming in, Sam keeps his eyes on Stark, who’s managed to stay standing, leaning against the wall, though Sam can see that he doesn’t have any weight on his right foot and wonders what’s wrong with it. Stark takes a deep breath and hitches a defiant look onto his face.

The agents don’t care; they’re silent and stoic as always. Daniel chuckles at the sight of Stark’s little resistance, looking pleased with himself, and Sam has to resist the urge to yell at the bastard. He knows it won’t do any good, and it would only make him feel more humiliated when he stood in his cell yelling uselessly and they dragged Stark away anyway.

The guards grab Stark’s arms as usual; he takes a single step along with them, but on the second, he lets out a tiny, quiet grunt of pain and collapses, on what Sam now assumes is a broken or badly twisted ankle. Sam silently files that information away—an injured ankle will make it a lot harder to walk out of here if they escape—and then wonders what the hell he’s even thinking. The way things are looking now, they’re not likely to get out of here at all. At this point, the kind of blind optimism that it takes to plan for when they escape is just ridiculous. But... maybe it’s better than despair. He’s not sure, and he’s really, really tired of being unsure.

Not for the first time, he wonders what the hell HYDRA is doing, exactly. What they’re aiming for here. They haven’t done anything with anyone but Stark. Other than the initial choice they forced on Steve, they’ve completely ignored them all, in fact. Stark is being taken away every day and returned every night looking worse than the day before, but there’s no hint that anything has changed. If they’re looking for information, they’re either very patient or working up to something. Clearly, Stark hasn’t given them what they want, or he’d be dead. They’d all be dead, because they’d be of no more use. But unless HYDRA is saving something for the rest of them… why aren’t they already dead? What is the point in keeping them prisoner and completely ignoring them?

He also can’t help but wonder what’s going on in the outside world. When news of their attack hit, were Wanda’s and Barnes’s planes delayed? Are they still in Wakanda, back in the limbo of not knowing what’s happening until those back in America figure out where the hell Stark and the rest of Steve’s team have gone? 

Or, well, maybe just Stark. Sam’s not stupid—he knows that, as much as they were reassured by ass-kissing politicians when their pardons went through that they’re “vital to the Avengers” and “true American heroes,” he knows that most of the people who matter don’t really want them back. Maybe he didn’t want to admit it to himself before, but the last few days have forced him to face some painful truths; why not another. 

Their return was only going to be triumphant in their eyes, Sam has to admit that now. Why Stark fought for it in the first place, particularly knowing what he knows now, Sam can’t fathom. Rhodes made no secret of his disdain for every one of them during their talks before returning. Vision was coldly indifferent to them, Ross wants nothing more than for them to slip up so he can have them arrested, and what’s left of SHIELD either can’t risk the disgraced Avengers further polluting their already tarnished reputation, or—in the case of the field agents, particularly the ones who were in the middle of missions when the data dump happened—outright hate them all. 

And though a majority of the American public supports them, Sam knows that’s only because the media has been doing so, which is only because Stark, who’s the darling of the public right now, has been doing so. The rest of the world isn’t so enamored with them, either. And though he’s sure at this point, only a few days in, that their disappearance is international news, if they stay gone for a long time or get killed, the public will move on. They won’t care about them once the hype dies down. Stark, who’s undoubtedly made the most impact on the world of any of them, will be mourned the most, and for the longest. The rest of them will fade into obscurity, except maybe for Steve.

And the world will never know what Steve did. He’ll be turned back into a golden icon, immortalized alongside Iron Man, called Stark’s friend and brother in arms. The thought makes Sam feel sick. But… Stark must have known that, too, when he fought to bring them back. Stark has been in front of the cameras his entire life and is a master with the media, he knows how to play them and how rumors and coverage and all of that work. Stark must have known how this would all play out: the others would return, Stark would be forced to smile for the cameras and shake the hands of the men who betrayed him and destroyed his family, respectively, and then the media would gush about what great friends they all were, and Stark would have to pretend it was true.

Sam knows why. He knows that if the truth gets out, the name of the Avengers will be ruined forever. It won’t just be Steve and his team that get dragged through the mud, it will be the very idea of superheroes. And Sam realizes why Stark did it, why he fought for them, why he’s doing all of this. Why he’s protecting them. He’s not protecting Steve or Barnes or any of them, really. He’s protecting the idea of the Avengers, and the public’s trust in them. He’s sacrificing his own comfort and happiness and health so that when the disasters happen, the world will still believe in someone who can protect it.

It’s not fair, none of it is fair, and for a moment Sam wishes, fervently and selfishly, that he’d never learned what Steve had done. That he’d gone on in happy ignorance, thinking that Stark was just a rich brat throwing a tantrum who brought them back because he felt guilty about what he’d done to them. If none of this had happened, if HYDRA hadn’t captured them and forced Steve into revealing what he’d done, then they would have gone back, and Sam would have joined the others in demanding an apology from Stark, the man they betrayed, and then in cursing his name when he avoided them, or insulted them, or whatever he would have done to the enemies he’d invited back into his home.

Knowing the truth sucks, but… thinking about that future that almost happened, Sam realizes that if they get out of here, he might be able to change some of that. He understands why he can’t tell the world what really happened in Siberia. He also won’t ever be able to reveal what really happened here—no doubt Stark also knows he’ll have to lie through his teeth about why he was the only one tortured by HYDRA, assuming they ever do get out. But when they go back, maybe Sam can be… not a friend, but at least not hostile, to Stark. Maybe he can try to run interference with the others. Maybe he can take what he’s learned, the guilt he feels, and turn it into something that can actually help the people he’s hurt.

When the agents leave with Stark, Sam looks down at the jacket still held loosely in his hand. The offering Stark had finally taken was the first step in repairing what’s broken between them, at least Sam hopes that it was. With a shake of his head, he realizes why Stark gave it back this morning, and it had nothing to do with rejection of the gift or personal feelings. He didn’t want HYDRA to take it, or ruin it. A simple reason, and Sam feels like an idiot for his initial hurt feelings when Stark tried to give it back this morning.

Staring down at it, thinking about Stark and everything that’s happened to him, Sam feels… something he can’t name. Something not very good. He drops the jacket by the bars dividing his and Stark’s cells and that feeling loosens a tiny bit. It’s almost like a penance, he thinks, for not being the one taken away and tortured every day. Keeping himself in the moderate discomfort that the cold brings might barely be a fraction of whatever Stark’s going through, but it will be a reminder of it.

The agent comes in with their food for the day, collecting their old bottles and wrappers. When he gets to Clint’s cell, he examines the bottle Clint has left out, then shakes his head and moves on to Sam without taking it or tossing anything in to Clint. 

“What? Come on!” Clint yells, moving to the front of his cell. The agent ignores him, tossing Sam’s stuff to him. When he moves on to Scott, Sam looks closer at the bottle Clint had left out and realizes it’s missing its cap. Clint must have kept it, hoping it wouldn’t be missed. What he was planning to do with it, Sam has no idea, but maybe he was hoping to start a collection, or just trying to be defiant in some manner. Obviously it didn’t work, but Sam’s a bit ashamed to admit it’s more than he’s done. He hasn’t even considered disobeying the agent’s initial instructions regarding their food and water. He’s not sure if it wasn’t worth the risk to him or he just didn’t think it would be possible.

The agent moves to the door and pauses again. “You give back a complete set tomorrow, or no one gets anything.”

“Okay, shit, here it is,” Clint says, bending down to pull the bottle cap out of his sock, but the agent is already pulling the door shut behind him. “Fuck!” Clint says as soon as he’s gone, stomping over to the front of his cell and screwing the cap back onto his empty bottle. 

“Hey, you tried,” Scott offers, though it’s clearly halfhearted. Sam wonders if that’s resentment he can hear laced in the words. It was smart of HYDRA, he grudgingly thinks, to give that ultimatum to Clint for his disobedience. Threatening to deny food and water to all of them is not only more motivation for them to do what they’re told, but will also turn them against each other if any of them become the reason they all starve for a day.

“Don’t fucking patronize me,” Clint snaps at Scott, then aims a bad-tempered kick at his bars and swears again. Scott lets out an irritated sigh, and Sam can see Steve glancing in Clint’s direction like he’s considering reprimanding him for his attitude—something that Sam knows will only make everything worse.

“Hey,” he says, catching Clint’s attention, and trying his best to keep his tone nonjudgmental. He keeps his granola bar, but moves to the front of his cell to toss his jerky to Clint, who reaches out between his bars to catch it automatically.

Clint looks down at it for a few seconds, jaw working, before muttering a quiet thanks. When Steve offers his water bottle, Clint takes it and drinks about a third before handing it back. He glances over at Steve, then Sam, and finally Scott, uncharacteristically cowed. “Sorry,” he finally says, and some of the tension drains out of Sam.

Scott just grunts an answer from his cell, but at least the peace has held. Sam sighs and goes back to lean against the wall, ready for another long, boring day of restless pacing and depressing thoughts.

He’s right; the day goes exactly as he thought, exactly like the last few. When Stark is brought back, he’s actively bleeding—not heavily, but he’s leaving a trail of small drops that are smeared by his dragging feet. The sight makes Sam tense, sparks a physical desire to do something, but there’s nothing he can do. He just moves back to the bars closest to Stark like the previous few nights and watches as the agents drop him in. Stark pushes himself up an inch and spits blood onto the floor, and Sam realizes that’s where the drops have been coming from. Hopefully, a bitten tongue or badly split lip, and not something worse like a tooth yanked out. HYDRA seems to be going for definite non-lethal methods and a tooth taken by trauma can bleed like hell, so he holds out hope that it really is something insignificant.

When they leave, Sam reaches for his untouched jacket and once again tosses it over to Stark. This time, instead of acknowledging him or trying to give it back, Stark just drags himself to his usual corner with the jacket in hand. He takes a few moments to pull it on cautiously, then attempts to curl up like usual, but one of his legs—the one with the messed up ankle—doesn’t seem to want to bend up into the normal position. After a few moments of trying, Stark gives up, panting, eyes squeezed tightly shut, and just leans back into the wall with one leg extended in front of him and one bent up into his chest.

“Tony? Are you—is there anything we can do?” Steve speaks up from his cell. It’s the first time he’s tried since Sam yelled at him the first night after Stark was brought back. Maybe Sam’s apology, or his sharing of food with Clint today, brought back enough of Steve’s confidence in their relationship that he thinks Sam will let him talk to Stark. Or maybe he’s just that worried about him.

Stark ignores them both. He just keeps his eyes closed and slumps down against the walls. Steve doesn’t try again, though he continues standing at the corner of his cell, trying to crane his neck enough to see into Stark’s cell and watch him with concern. Sam retreats to his usual sleeping spot, also resolving to keep an eye on Stark, but sitting still and watching a man sleep isn’t exactly stimulating, and before he knows it, his eyes are slipping closed and he’s falling asleep.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve spoiled you all with daily updates and I’ll try to continue that, but there may be a few chapters of this that are a little late. I went to the Michigan Renaissance Festival today (which is totally amazing, seriously, anyone in MI who has ever thought about going but isn’t sure, do it, it’s tons of fun) and ended up second in the archery competition, not bad for a total amateur who’s only been doing it for a few months and has never so much as taken a lesson. The girl who beat me actually trains at the place that sponsored the competition, so hey :) it was tons of fun! But I don’t mean to ramble about my life, just to say that I was gone all day (hence why this is being posted late tonight) and didn’t have any time to write the next chapter. We also start neurology on Monday and I definitely won’t have the kind of free time I did on psych. Still, not too many chapters to go until the end of this story!

Once again, Sam wakes before they come for Stark the next morning. He looks over at Stark automatically; it’s his first instinct now. Stark has slumped back during the night, mostly lying on the floor with only his shoulders and head still propped up against the wall. The position looks supremely uncomfortable, but though Stark’s eyes are open again, he isn’t making any move to get up.

Sam shifts over to the bars separating them. “Hey,” he says softly, then pauses. He tries to think of a question that isn’t stupid, can’t, and instead just settles on “are you okay?”

Predictably, Stark ignores him, but he does blink, take in a slightly stuttered breath, and then push himself up to his normal sitting position. Sam can’t see the injured ankle beneath his flight pants and shoes, but the tightening around his eyes every time it so much as shifts tells Sam it’s not any better than yesterday.

Stark pauses for a minute, eyes closed and leaning against the wall, and Sam hurts just looking at him, wondering how much he must hurt to have to steel himself for something as simple as moving, and knowing that there’s no end in sight. They’re coming for him again today, and tomorrow, and every day for the foreseeable future, unless Sam and the others can figure out a way out of here.

Sam doesn’t want that responsibility. He doesn’t want Stark’s life and health on his shoulders, or his conscience, any more than it already was thanks to Steve’s confession. But he doesn’t have a choice, and he can either wallow in self-pity or accept that responsibility and _do_ something. The problem is, he has no idea what to do. Other than passing his jacket to Stark every night, he’s useless, and he hates it. Clint has already proved that they can’t get away with anything in here. They’re being watched, listened to, and Sam can’t think of any way around that.

Stark makes his way slowly over to the bars to hand the jacket back, and Sam reaches out to take it without protest. He trusts now that Stark will accept it back when he’s brought back tonight. He doesn’t bother to try to touch Stark again, either, not after the reaction he got before. 

When Stark hands back the jacket, he actually raises his head and looks right at Sam for a few seconds, and it stops Sam short. Not because Stark usually won’t look at him, but because of what Sam’s seeing: anger, plain and simple. It’s not pain or frustration or hopelessness, but genuine anger in Stark’s eyes, and Sam is shocked to see it, wondering what he could have done to warrant it.

He doesn’t get long to contemplate it. The door opens just as Stark lets go of the jacket, and Sam finds himself standing and half-hiding the jacket behind himself on reflex, even though he knows it’s pointless. HYDRA is watching them, they must know about Sam and Stark passing it back and forth. If it wasn’t acceptable to them, Sam’s sure they’d have done something about it already. But that doesn’t mean Sam should draw attention to it.

Stark doesn’t bother to move or try to stand on his injured ankle this time. He lets the agents pull him up and just keeps his right foot off the ground, letting them drag him along. This time, there’s a heavy silence in the air when he’s taken away—no one bothers to protest. 

A moment after the door swings shut, Sam wonders if that’s why Stark was so angry with him. Sam stopped protesting against Stark being taken even before Steve did, after all. He knows it’s useless, and truthfully, he feared it might provoke even worse punishment for Stark himself, but Stark doesn’t know that. All he knows is that Steve and this group of people who stabbed him in the back and volunteered him for torture only bothered to even say anything about it for a couple days, and now they just silently watch him be dragged off every day.

Sam drops the jacket by the bars and resumes pacing in his cell, thinking about Stark and his anger. Maybe Sam just misinterpreted it. Maybe Stark is just as frustrated as Sam, at the circumstances, the lack of change, their inability to do anything, all of it, and Sam read that as anger. Or maybe he’s pissed off at Sam for acting like giving him a jacket is some grand gesture here, or enough to make up for everything Sam’s screwed up. He glances down at the jacket, sighs, and turns away.

Then turns back and stares at it for a minute. He shakes his head. “I’m a moron,” he whispers to himself, going back and snatching up the jacket.

He’s been leaving it all day, feeling like not wearing it is some kind of penance to pay, like he doesn’t deserve it and should leave it for Stark. Which there might be some truth to, but what he’s really been doing is leaving it on a cold floor all day. Preventing it from being warmed with his body heat each night when he gives it to Stark.

He inwardly berates himself for not _thinking_ , never mind that he knows very well that exhaustion and hunger and extreme stress blunt a person’s ability to problem-solve and think logically. Maybe it’s reasonable that Sam wouldn’t have realized this until now, but that doesn’t make it suck any less for Stark, who’s been suffering more than necessary because of Sam not thinking clearly.

He puts the jacket on, and then huddles into it gratefully. It really is cold in the prison, and aside from when he’s highly agitated and pacing, that cold is always keeping him just uncomfortable enough to notice it. Though he’d noticed after the first night without the jacket that he was significantly colder in its absence, he hadn’t appreciated just how much warmth it was giving him even when he’s awake. And he shakes his head at himself again for his idiotic refusal to wear it before. If he wants any hope of figuring out a way out of here, he should be doing everything he can to keep himself healthy and clear-headed.

He rubs his hands together and then shoves them into the pockets of the jacket, for what he later realizes is the first time since the day they got here.

Thankfully, he has just enough functioning brain cells left to not react when he feels something in one of the pockets. It’s strange and he’s confused—he knows very well HYDRA took everything out of his pockets while they were unconscious after the initial attack—but HYDRA is watching them and if he acts suspicious, no doubt they’ll be storming in here any minute. So he fights to keep his face neutral and just keep hunching over, acting like he’s just cold, and trying to figure out what’s going on.

He can blame the hunger and stress and exhaustion that are clouding his thoughts for how damn long it takes him to figure it out. When he does, he wants to curse himself more than ever. _This_ is what Stark was so angry about. Stark’s been trying to pass him something, maybe for days now, and Sam has been too stupid, too preoccupied with guilt, to realize it. They’ve been passing the jacket back and forth for days now; who knows how long ago Stark put whatever this is in the pocket. Day one? Two? How long has Sam been looking at him with pity, thinking he was depending entirely on Sam and the others to get him out of here, while Stark was doing his best to come up with something on his own and Sam was ignoring him?

He takes a deep breath and forces himself to focus. They’re being watched, and he can’t know how closely. He needs to be smart about this. Whatever Stark put in his jacket—something swiped from the guards, or the people in wherever the hell he’s being taken every day, Sam assumes—he did it carefully, and Sam can’t be the one to ruin it for him. He has to be just as careful.

He keeps his face as blank as possible and tries to feel carefully in the pocket with his fingers, attempting to figure out what it is without making it obvious what he’s doing. Round, flat, familiar—it feels like a coin, maybe a quarter. Not exactly useful, but maybe it was all Stark could get his hands on. Sam’s honestly impressed that he managed to take anything and pass it to Sam. Maybe it’s not actually a coin at all but something that feels like one and could help them escape, but that seems unlikely. Maybe it’s supposed to be a message of some kind or have some significance—if that’s the case, Sam’s not getting it.

Or maybe, Sam thinks, once again berating his own initial stupidity, it was just a test run. A trial, to see if Stark could successfully steal something from HYDRA and pass it to Sam. After all, if it didn’t work—either because he was caught or because Sam was too clueless to get it, like it’s been so far, and that must have been an awful feeling for Stark—then there’d be no point in trying to steal away anything else. Stark would have to abandon that plan and come up with something else. Which might very well be impossible. This could be their only shot, so Sam has to get it right.

It takes him a while to think of a plan, but that’s okay. He has plenty of time, stuck in his cell all day, and pacing back and forth with his hands in his pockets just makes him look like he’s cold and restless—which he is—instead of revealing that he’s running his fingers over the surface of the coin and trying to think, for the first time in days, of a real plan.

There really aren’t any hiding places in his cell, and even if there were a crack or a hollow or something that he could potentially store stolen items in, no doubt it would look highly suspicious if he were spending a lot of his time hunched over some crack in the wall. What he really needs is to _create_ a hiding place, and hope that HYDRA holds to their pattern of utterly ignoring the rest of its prisoners and never searches his cell.

When he’s come up with a half-decent idea, he slows his pacing, trying to make it look natural. He eventually stops and leans against the bars, closing his eyes as though he’s tired. Then he smiles ruefully to himself—he doesn’t really have to fake it; he _is_ tired. He goes back to his normal sleeping spot, propped against the solid back wall of his cell, but then spends a few minutes fidgeting uncomfortably.

Another thing he doesn’t really have to fake. It’s been unceasingly painful and irritating to sleep propped against the hard, cold wall every night, sitting up on the hard, cold floor. But before now, he hadn’t thought the tiny comfort of putting his head down on something soft would be worth sacrificing one of his layers. Now, after hopefully successfully faking a few minutes of contemplation, he pretends to be desperate enough to try it.

The jacket is his heaviest layer; underneath it, he’s wearing a thin inner layer with long sleeves and a short-sleeved shirt over the top of that. He’s thankful for his layering when they left Wakanda—the country might have been hot, but he knew the jet would likely have good air conditioning and he’d gone prepared. Now, he strips off the outer t-shirt and then puts the jacket back on over his single long layer. Wadding up the t-shirt to form a sort of pillow, he lays down, shifting around in a prolonged, only slightly exaggerated bid for comfort and a decent position. In the process, he manages to slip the coin out of the pocket of the jacket and underneath the “pillow.”

It might be small, it might amount to nothing. They could be discovered tomorrow, or this plan could go nowhere. Stark might not be able to actually steal anything of use and pass it to Sam. There are a thousand ways this can go to hell, either spectacularly or just… fizzling out into nothing. It’s a tiny success, and in the face of what’s happening, it’s not much. But right now, it feels like a victory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say that someone saw this coming and commented on the possibility back in chapter 5 (and then at least one more after chapter 6 too), and it was really hard for me to stay quiet about it. Kudos to that person ;)


	9. Chapter 9

Sam does manage to doze after a while, even though he thought he wouldn’t be able to. The rush of adrenaline from realizing that Stark has some semblance of a plan and a way to execute it with Sam had given him more energy than he’s had in days, and he’d thought it would keep him up for sure. But once the novelty of his little rebellion wore off, that spike of energy drained away and left him feeling as exhausted as ever.

He’s not sure how long he sleeps, but it’s not the door opening that wakes him up. It’s voices; Steve’s and Scott’s, in fact. They’re quiet, not enough to really disturb him, and Sam’s still in the haze of sleep. He doesn’t focus in for a few minutes, just drifts along in a half-asleep state. He catches a few words of conversation here and there, but they seem to float in and out of his head, never staying long enough for him to contemplate their meaning.

Eventually he hears his name, more than once, and decides that’s enough to get him up. He struggles up from the molasses-slow depths of exhausted sleep and tunes into what’s being said.

“—hold him long enough for you to get it,” Steve is saying when Sam’s brain starts working well enough to follow the conversation.

“Yeah, and again, it’s a stupid idea,” Scott counters. He has the frustrated tone of someone who’s beating their head against a brick wall. One by the name of Steve Rogers, Sam assumes, and then has a brief, fleeting moment to think about how much impact Steve’s confessions have had on him, to make him jump to Steve as the cause of problems instead of the solution, assume the worst of Steve instead of the best.

“Not if it works,” Steve says, and Scott makes a frustrated noise.

“It won’t. Even if it did, I’ve already said, you don’t even know if he has anything on him.” Sam wonders who they’re talking about; Stark? Did they somehow figure out what Sam learned just a few hours ago, about what Stark has done?

“We could use him as a bargaining chip,” Steve suggests, and at that, Sam opens his eyes and rolls over to push himself up. If they are talking about Stark, then this conversation is already going somewhere that Sam needs to put a stop to immediately.

“Like a hostage?” Scott says. There’s no distaste in it, but Sam has a feeling they’re not talking about Stark after all. It wouldn’t make any sense, considering their situation.

Clint speaks up. “It wouldn’t work. He’s a grunt, and it’s HYDRA, man. They’d probably shoot him themselves. Punishment for getting caught or something.”

Sam starts to put together the pieces. They’re trying to hatch an escape plan, probably involving grabbing one of the guards who keep coming in and out every day. The single one who brings them food would be their best bet, Sam thinks, since he’s always alone. But like Clint just said, there’s no way HYDRA would give any ground to their prisoners just because they threatened to hurt one of the low-level agents who guarded them. HYDRA doesn’t have any qualms about sacrificing people.

Even if they could come up with a realistic plan, it’ll never work, not when they’re talking out loud. HYDRA is listening in to every word they say. Don’t the others realize that? Maybe they missed it, maybe they’re just that desperate, or maybe it’s a ploy, something they’re doing on purpose. Sam can’t imagine what the goal could be, other than to provoke HYDRA into disciplining them in some manner. 

Sam can’t risk that; he can’t risk the one tiny ray of hope he now has being extinguished by a search of the cells or another change in the current status quo. He opens his mouth to say something about how they’re being watched and stop the current conversation, but then closes it again. It could be the wrong move to alert HYDRA to the fact that they know they’re being watched. Or, at least, to bring attention to it. Just like outright plotting an attack, it could draw unwanted attention to them.

But Daniel wasn’t exactly hiding it when he made allusions to listening in. He must have known they would work it out. Sam weighs the pros and cons of saying something and spends just a moment paralyzed with indecision. He’s becoming uncomfortably familiar with that feeling in here. Finally, he decides that whatever the others are planning, it’s less likely to lead anywhere than what he and Stark are now doing. Also, actively planning an attack on a guard seems more likely to provoke attention to them than just mentioning that they’re being watched. Right now, protecting the secrecy of what he and Stark are really doing with his jacket is the most important thing Sam can do.

He pushes himself upright just as Steve opens his mouth to say something else. “Clint’s right,” Sam says, and they all look over at him. “Whatever you were thinking of…” he pauses, wondering whether he needs to elaborate, and decides he doesn’t. “They’re listening to us, remember? Pretty sure they can plan for anything you might do.”

Steve and Scott immediately glance around at the walls as though they’re hoping to spot the hidden cameras or microphones, whatever it is HYDRA’s using. But Clint just nods in Sam’s direction gravely. Right, the spy, at least, must be aware enough of bugs and how to act in a situation like this not to be discussing plans out loud like that. It makes Sam worry that they really do have something else going on, an unspoken plan that Sam isn’t getting and is now ruining, but he maintains that hiding what he’s doing with Stark is more important than anything else.

“Right,” Scott grumbles, settling back against the corner of his cell with his arms crossed. “Not like it was going anywhere anyway.”

“Scott,” Steve says, but Scott doesn’t look over at him, and Sam can see the way Steve’s face falls at the clear lack of faith in him. “We’ll figure something out,” Steve eventually says, but it’s lacking and they all know it. It’s been nearly a week now and none of them have figured out anything.

Except for Stark, of course; the most emotionally and physically compromised of all of them, and yet currently the most useful. And now Sam too, by association, though it’s not because he’s special and he knows that. It’s because his cell is next to Stark’s, plain and simple. He likes to think that his attitude, his anger toward Steve when he found out the truth, and his attempts to help without judgment or patronizing pity—not too much, at least—have helped to move things along. 

Sam wonders for a minute whether, if Steve had been the one next to Stark, any of this could have happened. As much of a problem as Stark must have with Steve, his willingness to bring them all back home and work with them again even at the expense of his own comfort makes Sam think that he would have worked with Steve in a heartbeat in order to get them all out of here. But Steve isn’t exactly a master of subtlety, and if Stark managed to pass something to him, Sam doubts that Steve could hide it well. Maybe that’s just his own ego or his lingering anger at Steve talking, but he can’t help but think that other than Clint—whose terrible attitude toward Stark, at least at first, would probably have hindered them more than his spy experience would have helped—Sam’s the best suited for this job. He could be deluding himself, but it’s giving him some small comfort, so why the hell not.

The guard that the others were discussing attacking comes in like usual, collects their trash and gives them their food and water. He doesn’t say anything, or give any hint that he knows or cares about their earlier ideas of ambushing him. Sam is sure that he knows about it, but just doesn’t care. HYDRA has them in a corner and they know it—they have no reason at all to fear their prisoners, and that rankles. 

Like good little prisoners, they give everything back today, bottle caps and all. Clint passed back the wrapper for the jerky Sam gave him yesterday so that Sam can give back a complete set, and there will be no question that they’re obeying the rules. HYDRA has managed to turn them into obedient sheep just by threatening their food and water, and Sam feels a flare of resentment and anger that almost manifests as a lunge at the bars as the agent tosses him his daily rations. He just… wants to see what the bastard would do. Find out if Sam can make a dent in that blank expression, that irritatingly unthreatened demeanor. 

Instead, he catches his food and his water bottle and retreats to the back of his cell, taking a deep breath and forcing himself to sit down. The situation is breaking down some of his control, but he’s not stupid enough to try anything. He can’t jeopardize the system he now has going with Stark, but not just that; he doesn’t want to put himself or the others in danger either. 

None of them talk through the day. Lost in thought, maybe—Sam is, at least—or possibly trying to plan silently and figure out a way to communicate with the others that won’t be caught by HYDRA. Seems more likely that that’s what Steve is doing all day, though Sam doubts he gets anywhere with it. Stark seems to be the only one who could solve that particular puzzle.

When they bring Stark back that night, he and Sam repeat their usual routine. Stark spends a few more minutes than usual on the floor where he was dropped, even after Sam tosses him the now-empty jacket, and Sam stays at the bars, worried. When Stark eventually pushes himself up and grabs the jacket, Sam flinches at the sight of the red, abraded marks ringing his throat. 

Stark makes his way back to his usual corner and pulls the jacket back on. Sam thinks for a second that there’s a slightly happier look on Stark’s face despite the worse injuries, but he’s probably imagining it. Stark, the only one of them to come up with a plan and execute it even under the stress of daily torture, who found a way to get past his personal problems with the lot of them and pass something to Sam, is too good to let something show like that. But Sam knows that Stark has felt the empty pocket and understands that Sam is now on board with what he’s trying to do.

Stark is quiet, as usual, not saying anything to any of them or even making eye contact. He just sits in his corner and stares off into the distance, maybe thinking of escape plans. Sam sits back and watches him, as usual, and hurts just looking at the way Stark’s expression tightens and his hand twitches like he wants to raise it up when he attempts to swallow.

Watching him, a horrible thought comes to Sam. His stomach clenches and his throat tightens as he glances over their trash, already at the front of their cages and waiting to be taken away tomorrow. The food has been coming every day a few hours after they take Stark away, and it’s finished long before they bring Stark back. He hasn’t even thought about it before, but now he can’t believe the oversight. How could he never have asked?

Moving back to the bars, Sam tries to catch Stark’s eye, but failing, clears his throat instead. “Hey, have they—have you been getting food? Water?” he asks when Stark glances over at him. He hears an intake of breath behind him, not sure who it comes from, but whoever it is has obviously realized this for the first time too. It doesn’t make Sam feel any better to know that none of them thought to ask whether Stark was being fed—in fact, it makes him feel worse. Here Stark is risking his neck to try to get them out of here, on top of being tortured thanks to Steve’s decision, and they just keep failing him.

Stark looks away when Sam asks the question, staring hard at the floor next to his feet, which Sam interprets as a negative. He could kick himself for already having finished all of his food and water for the day. “Can we do anything? I—they’ve been giving us food, tomorrow we could keep some for you, you could…” he trails off when he sees Stark’s shoulders tighten and the slight shake of his head. “No?” he’s confused, and Stark’s refusal to look at him or really communicate is making things harder. It’s hard to tamp down the frustration. It’s not like HYDRA would suspect them of anything just for _talking_ , and Stark’s making this more difficult than it needs to be.

Stark gives another tiny shake of his head, still staring determinedly at the floor. “So… you’ve been getting food? Water?” Sam tries to confirm, and this time he gets a small nod. “Okay. Good. …Okay.” He figures he isn’t going to get any more out of Stark and just goes back to his makeshift pillow at the back of his cell.

Stark could be pissed off that none of them thought to ask this until now, but… well, last time Sam assumed that something Stark was doing that didn’t make sense was because of some personal attitude issue, he’d been pretty damn wrong. He doesn’t want to make that mistake again.

It occurs to him that while Stark’s utter silence up to now might have been excused as a passive way to avoid interacting with Steve and the people who betrayed him, just now, that was something else. Something more. He’d gone out of his way to avoid looking at or communicating with Sam until Sam had pushed him, and even then, the tension in his body spoke of fear.

Another revelation for Sam to feel like an idiot over. HYDRA has been doing plenty to drive them apart and keep them apart so far, from goading Sam into making Steve reveal what happened in Siberia to ignoring everyone but Stark to threatening their food and water if any of them rebel. It’s quite possible, likely in fact, that they’ve threatened Stark too on top of torturing him. It would be a wise move for them, knowing that Stark is by far the smartest and the most creative among them, and most likely to come up with a way out. Hindering his ability to communicate with the others would be a good move for HYDRA.

Stark’s probably been told that if he talks to the others, HYDRA will kill him, or torture the others too, or something. It’s not like there’d be a way to confirm it without testing it out, and clearly Stark believes them and isn’t willing to risk it. He hasn’t said a word to Sam or the others since the first time Daniel came and forced the choice on Steve, he doesn’t even make eye contact most of the time, and he’s scared enough of provoking HYDRA’s wrath that he doesn’t even want to answer Sam’s direct questions.

It makes Sam slightly uncomfortable to think that that attitude, the willingness to cut off all communication with the rest of them and the refusal to risk them by trying anything, makes Stark a better person than Steve has been since their capture. For all the revelations lately about what Stark has sacrificed for the rest of them and the selfish, irresponsible things Steve has done, most of Sam’s prejudices are deeply rooted and hard to overcome. Even with his anger at Steve and his recent tendency to defend Stark in this situation, it’s still easy to automatically compare Steve and Stark, and Steve usually starts out on top. 

For once, Sam’s thinking about why that is. Before he even met either of them, that’s how it was: Steve had an automatic advantage over Stark in Sam’s mind, and that’s ridiculous. Meeting them had only reinforced that favoritism, but he should really amend that to _meeting Steve_ , because he’d barely ever worked with Stark, in fact. He’s already kicking himself for his blind faith in Steve and the pedestal he’d put him on, but now he’s finally asking himself why he was ignorant enough to base his opinion of Stark on rumors and media and hateful words from the mouths of people who were obviously biased against him, without giving the man himself a chance.

He falls asleep that night wondering why, exactly, he never bothered to examine Tony Stark in depth.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I got more time before and after neuro orientation today than I thought I would, so the daily updates thing will keep up for at least the next chapter. Yay!

Seventeen days. 

It’s been two and a half weeks in their prison, and Sam is desperate. It doesn’t seem real; for all that he realized at the beginning that they were in deep shit and that HYDRA had them very effectively contained, he hadn’t really imagined being here this long.

No one has come for them, which Sam isn’t really surprised about, but it still pains him. He’s absolutely sure they’re looking, for Tony if not for the rest of them, but clearly HYDRA did their homework when they captured them. The one surprise in all of it is that Tony, master of technology, doesn’t have something on—or in—him that has helped the search. A tracking device, maybe. But then, HYDRA might have a way to deactivate something like that. If Sam has thought of it, he can bet HYDRA did too.

He might be going a little bit crazy in here. All of them could be, though it’s hard to tell, because they don’t talk much, even less as the time has worn on. Every few days, Steve has made increasingly halfhearted attempts to plan for some kind of escape or attack, but they’re fruitless and they all know it. They can’t launch a surprise attack when they’re never let out of their cells. They can’t sweet talk guards who ignore them (and that’s not exactly the area of expertise of any of them, anyway—maybe if Natasha were here). Even Daniel stopped coming by in the mornings after the first week; it’s just the guards who take Stark away every day, now. None of them ever say a word to the prisoners.

With or without the jacket that’s passed back and forth daily between him and Tony, the chill has started to seep into Sam’s very bones. He paces restlessly most days, both out of frustration for the circumstances and in an attempt to generate a little more body heat, but it doesn’t do much. He’s still cold, he’s still angry and upset, and he knows he’s slowing down, both in body and in mind. His muscles are stiff, no matter what he does to try and stretch or exercise in his cell. Just standing up every day feels like running a marathon.

The food probably isn’t helping; not only is it not really enough to sate them—there’s a constant gnawing hunger in Sam’s stomach that’s impossible to ignore, except on the occasions where it’s drowned out by intense muscle cramps or a blinding headache—but it’s also getting pretty old. Sam’s starting to wonder if he’s ever actually tasted anything but dried meat and granola. If they get out of here, he’s never eating another granola bar or piece of jerky in his life.

Their escape plans go nowhere. The only thing they have to possibly work with, their daily rations, have been threatened enough to warn them away from trying to tamper with them. Not that it stopped Clint from trying one more time, though. Though “trying” suggests it was thought through, and Sam can’t call what Clint did anything but an outburst, a tantrum. Clint’s anger and frustration and hopelessness are manifesting as bouts of physical aggression and shouting, where Sam’s have become apathetic silences where his limbs feel like lead and he simply lays on the floor of his cell for hours at a time.

A few days after the one week mark, Clint spent the day pacing in his cell and muttering about his wife and kids. He must have worked himself up into a rage, because when the agent with the food came by his cell to exchange his trash for new food and water, Clint rushed to the front, snatched up his empty water bottle, and hurled it at the agent. An empty plastic bottle stuffed with food wrappers wasn’t exactly a threat, and the agent just caught it one-handed, face blank, but the rest of them were on edge, waiting for the axe to fall.

Nothing happened. The agent didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything unusual. He inspected the bottle, saw that it was whole, and tossed Clint his new stuff. He repeated the ritual with the rest of them and left the room. The sound of the door closing seemed to echo longer than usual, like it was the soundtrack to the dread permeating the room. Surely that wouldn’t go unpunished.

It did. They waited, all of them silent and in a heightened state of stressful anticipation, for hours. It was nauseating, and Sam couldn’t help but come up with a thousand awful scenarios, possible ways that they could be hurt for what just happened. None of them came to fruition, but the thought of them was almost punishment enough. Which could have been what HYDRA was going for. The mind games are a specialty for a sadistic Nazi group, after all, and their cold, tired, hungry prisoners are particularly susceptible to them.

But when they brought Stark back that night, for the first time, he was unconscious. He remained out for an agonizingly long time after he was dropped by the guards, and Sam could see Clint, shoulders hunched defensively, watching from his cell. It felt like at least an hour before Stark coughed himself awake—and then kept coughing, tipping himself over into a hacking fit that nearly put him out again as he wrapped bruised arms around what Sam highly suspected were several broken ribs. For the first time that night, Stark just curled up on the floor with Sam’s jacket half-covering him and slept right where he was instead of trying to drag himself to his usual corner.

Clint didn’t try anything with the guards again. They’ll never really know whether what happened that day was a direct result of what Clint had done, but Clint never risks it again. Now his outbursts are contained to just pulling at his own hair and occasionally kicking the bars of his cell.

Not that he has much in the way of outbursts by day seventeen. Maybe in the universe’s idea of retribution for Tony’s broken ribs, Clint has developed a disturbing wet cough that seems to sap most of his energy. He sits at the back of his cell most of the day, just staring at nothing and occasionally doubling over for an intense coughing fit that Sam’s always afraid will be the last of him.

Scott has withdrawn almost completely. He’s never been a big talker since they got here, but now he barely responds even when someone says his name. Sometimes he doesn’t. He at least sits and stands and walks around every day, keeping his body moving, but he doesn’t interact with the others anymore. Sam’s reminded every once in a while that he’s been to prison before and wonders if this is something he did there, but it isn’t really comparable, he knows. Even the worst American prison lets the prisoners outside every once in a while, gives them opportunities to interact with each other and make human contact.

Steve looks as healthy as ever, at least physically. Sam knows the serum enhanced his metabolism and that the guy can easily burn through several times a normal person’s caloric intake in a day, but apparently the serum can also adapt to not being fed enough, at least for a short period. Sam has no idea what might happen to his body if they’re here for months, years, but really, he’s more worried about Steve’s mind than anything. Steve seems despondent, maybe because of his own utter lack of a plan or maybe because the others have stopped responding to him. Sam’s not sure, but the thought of Steve giving up is somehow almost worse than anything else.

Except for what’s happening to Tony, of course. God, nothing could beat that, and Sam doesn’t even want to think about it, but he doesn’t really have a choice. Tony—and he’s Tony now, somewhere in two and a half weeks of introspection and of being the only ones making any kind of real contact with each other, Stark was replaced by Tony—isn’t going anywhere, and he and Sam are depending on each other.

But Sam’s failing in that. In every way possible. Tony is the worst off of any of them by far; the broken ribs were just the start. He can barely move anymore, and spends every night now on the floor where he’s dropped by the guards instead of bothering to go to his corner. He doesn’t even try to push himself up when they come for him in the morning, just letting them pull him all the way up from the floor. Sam hasn’t seen him actually stand or walk on his own feet in weeks. His breathing is labored and there’s a rattle to it that Sam doesn’t like. He has more bruises than normal skin now, and Sam has caught sight of half-healed cuts and angry burn marks in a few places. He shakes violently when they pass the jacket back and forth, and though he has made eye contact with Sam a few more times, his eyes always look bloodshot and glassy, like he’s not really seeing much.

Still, there’s a steady stream of incoming stuff. Sam has had to adjust his “pillow” more than once to hide the bulk of things Tony keeps retrieving for him. He’s considered switching the shirt out for the long one he’s still wearing for more coverage, but he doesn’t know how he would hide the stuff during the switch, and he does need the longer sleeves for warmth, so he just does his best to hide his stash beneath the smaller shirt. He’s acquired quite a collection: paperclips, a length of wire, several magnets of varying sizes, two small electronic chips of some kind, a pen and a pen casing, four chunks of metal he can’t name, two batteries, and a few other random parts he can’t even identify. 

He used to be excited, elated even, to be getting these things. He felt like they were going somewhere, not only rebelling against HYDRA but also finding a way out of here, coming up with a plan. Now, the very thought of them nearly makes him sick with guilt. 

He has no idea what he’s doing. Tony is trusting him with this because he has to: Sam’s the one whose cell is next to his, the only one he can pass these things to. Whatever they’re doing to him all day obviously exhausts him, and he’s clearly under watch. He’s lucky he can take this stuff at all, there’s no way he could actually make anything of it, so he’s forced to trust that part to Sam. But Sam has no clue what to do with all of this stuff.

He can’t tell any of the others, can’t ask for their advice. Even if he could ask Tony for help without letting HYDRA know what they’re doing, Tony won’t talk to him, or touch him, or even look at him most of them time. He’s thought a few times about Scott; he’s an engineer, after all, he might be able to do more than Sam can, but Sam has no idea how to involve him. He can’t talk freely. He’s afraid to even ask any general questions, because he really knows nothing about tech or engineering and the specifics he’d need to get into to actually build anything useful out of the parts he has would surely make HYDRA suspicious.

Once or twice, he’s thought about trying to just pass everything he has to Scott and hope that Scott figures it out on his own, but again, he has no idea how. Not only would he need to get what he has to Scott, but he’d somehow have to figure out a way to get new things from Tony to Scott, and he can’t imagine how they could do that without arousing suspicion.

He planned to throw caution to the wind one day and just give everything he had to Scott anyway, but his half-baked plan fizzled out during step one. Watching Scott slump over in the corner of his cell, Sam had called out and then asked if he wanted somewhere to lay his head down, offering his own makeshift pillow and hoping that Scott would accept so he could pass all of his stuff on. But though Scott had taken an interest in the idea, he was wearing two layers himself, and ended up sacrificing one to make his own pillow. There was no excuse for Sam to pass his over, and he just went back to his usual spot, defeated.

Sam has no doubt that if Tony were the one sitting here all day in a cell, relatively healthy and clear-headed and with practically infinite time on his hands, he already could have built them three different ways out of here with just the items Sam now has. Sam has wished, a few times, that their positions were reversed, so that Tony could have that opportunity.

The problem with that plan is that if Sam were in Tony’s position, he wouldn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t know what Tony needed, which parts to try and grab. He probably wouldn’t have even thought of trying to pass something to Tony in the first place, if he were the one being dragged off and tortured all day. Even if he’d had the idea, he’s not sure he could have pulled it off. He doesn’t know how Tony is doing it, or where he’s hiding the stuff. Though he looks—trying not to be too obvious about it, so he doesn’t make HYDRA suspicious—he can never actually spot Tony pulling out whatever he’s taken each day and putting it into the jacket pockets. Sam isn’t that sneaky or clever—he’d probably be caught. 

He might not be able to withstand the physical brutality, anyway. He has no idea what they’re doing every day, what they’re asking of Tony, but he must not be giving it to them. If there’s one thing Sam’s sure of now, it’s that Tony is a hell of a lot stronger than any of them can claim to be. Stronger than any of them ever gave him credit for.

Tony’s too good to give anything away in his expression, but Sam can imagine the disappointment, the frustration, the hopelessness with how useless Sam is. Tony’s been working so hard, risking everything, to do the one thing he can for them, and Sam can’t even make use of it. Sam wants to cry every time he sees him now, to apologize to Tony for being too incompetent to make use of these gifts and beg for his forgiveness, even though he knows he doesn’t deserve it. But he can’t compromise Tony’s position. So he just sits in his cell all day, watching Tony being beaten into submission, watching the others fade away, feeling his own body failing on him, and wonders how close they all are to death.

It should be a shameful thought. Sam’s never considered suicide before, not even when Riley died. He always channeled his own despair into helping other people, and in turn, that helped him too. But there’s no one to help here. All the patient listening and kind words in the world won’t fix their situation. He’s always believed that there’s a way out and up, that no situation should be considered hopeless, and that ending your own life is never the way out. But this… he can admit that he’s never been this hopeless. He’s failing here, failing himself and Tony and the others, and he’s not completely sure that if there were a gun in front of him right now, he wouldn’t take the fast way out.

When they bring Tony back after another long, despairing day, Sam can barely bring himself to go to the bars and offer the jacket. He hasn’t even tried to make contact with Tony in days, too ashamed of himself and his lack of progress, of how he’s letting Tony down when he knows Tony’s depending on him. He wants to turn away in shame now.

The feeling only intensifies when, instead of taking the jacket and curling up to sleep on the floor, Tony drags himself to the bars, slowly and painfully, leaving blood smeared on the floor, and shoves the jacket back through immediately. Sam feels tears prick his eyes at the sight. So Tony’s finally gotten sick of the charade, finally accepted that Sam is useless to him and that he’d might as well stop risking himself like this.

Sam grabs it and moves to push it back at Tony, to insist that he take it and maybe just keep it this time, to say _something_ to him, but he stops the second he picks the jacket up. It’s much heavier than it should be—there’s something in it, something big, or at least heavy. And Tony giving it back immediately isn’t because he’s lost faith in Sam, but because he’s found something that he doesn’t want to keep on him all night and give back in the morning. 

Sam isn’t sure whether he should bother worrying that it’s a radioactive element or something. The radiation would take a lot longer to kill him than this situation will. Whatever it is, Sam can’t quite bring himself to feel hopeful anymore. A chunk of plutonium or something might be highly useful to Tony, but it doesn’t mean any more to Sam than a piece of granite would. It won’t magically give him the skills necessary to put any of his parts together into something useful. And if it’s a gun or some kind of weapon Tony’s managed to take, Sam still doesn’t see how that’s useful to him. He could try to threaten a guard, but that won’t make them let him out of his cell. 

Sam takes the jacket back with a whispered apology that he hopes the guards will think is just about his lack of ability to do anything for Tony physically. He turns his back to Tony, reaches into the jacket, and finds their salvation.


	11. Chapter 11

A phone. Tony has gotten him a phone, and Sam can’t actually stop a few relieved, overwhelmed tears from falling. He hopes desperately that if HYDRA is watching right now, they’ll think the tears are just another sign of Sam breaking down.

His first instinct is just to pull it out, just because he’s so overcome with the possibilities, the first real hope he’s had in weeks, the sudden lifting of the heavy weight of their impending death that had been settling lower on his shoulders every day since their capture. But he can’t do that. He needs to be smart about this. Now more than ever, he cannot screw this up.

He can’t imagine how Tony could possibly have managed to get a phone off of one of the guards—from the feel of it, it’s a regular smartphone, probably someone’s personal device and not one that would just be sitting around—but he did, and there’s no time to contemplate the mystery of it. The phone will be missed, without a doubt. Sam’s in the tense, precarious position of needing to hurry up without _looking_ like he’s hurrying. 

He forces himself to take several slow breaths and stay at the bars, near Tony. He hesitates and half turns back, hoping he just looks like he doesn’t want to keep the jacket. By now, Tony must know that Sam knows what he did, so he turns and tries to offer the jacket back with full confidence that it will be rejected. “Come on, just take it,” he says softly.

Tony turns his head away, refusing to make eye contact with Sam, and Sam sighs for show, like he’s disappointed that Tony won’t just take the comfort. He contemplates making an attempt to look like he’s draping the jacket over Tony anyway, then wonders if that’s over the top, or if he can risk it without revealing what’s hidden in the folds of the jacket.

Tony solves the problem for him by dragging himself a few feet farther from the bars, then heaving a shuddering breath of air and collapsing. Sam’s stomach leaps up into his throat at the sight; maybe Tony’s sudden retrieval of something so vital is coming at a more specific time than Sam had thought. He’d assumed this sudden change was just because Tony accepted that Sam wasn’t going to be able to do anything with the other stuff Tony had stolen, but… if Tony really is close to done, that would explain it. If he knows that he won’t hold out or be of use much longer, then risking everything for this phone would be a necessary move.

Yet another reason Sam can’t waste it. He hovers at the bars, both out of genuine concern for Tony and because it would look suspicious if he just left Tony in that state, but there’s not much he can do except for push forward with what Tony’s given him. Tony has officially given everything he can, passed the baton to Sam, and Sam needs to make it work.

So he forces himself to turn his back on Tony and make his way back to his usual spot, slowly and casually. He might be overdoing it a little, but hopefully it’s interpreted as deference to his aching, tired body and not as suspicious behavior. He stretches out on the floor, putting his head down onto his pillow-turned-stash, jacket in his hands. He can’t put it on—it fits him well and the shape of the phone would be too obvious. He also needs a way to look at the phone without being seen, in order to make a call.

In the last week or so, Sam’s occasionally pulled a shirt or his jacket up over his head to help block out light and sound when he wants to nap, or sometimes as a sign of irritation when he’s annoyed at the others, though that last one is becoming rare now that none of them speak much anymore. He desperately hopes for it now, for the excuse to do it, and maybe there is a God out there, because his prayers are answered in the form of Steve.

“Tony?” Steve’s asking. Steve can’t see incredibly well from his cell, all the way down the row and across from Tony, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying to watch or ask after Tony repeatedly since they’ve been captured. He might be able to see enough to know that right now Tony is not looking too good, but clearly he doesn’t know what to say. “Hang in there,” he says lamely, and Sam actually hears a wet, disbelieving noise from Clint’s cell. It’s the first sound Clint has made in days.

Steve calls Tony’s name a couple more times, and Sam resists the urge to smile in victory. Instead, he rolls his eyes, trying to look as exasperated as he would surely feel if it weren’t for the precious prize hidden in his arms, and he lets out a false sound of annoyance and yanks the side of the jacket up over his head and shoulders, covering him. Shielding him from having to listen to Steve, or so HYDRA hopefully thinks, but also shielding him from whatever is being used to watch them.

He raises his hands up to his face and grasps the phone in them, letting a few more grateful tears fall. It’s hard, after so long, not to be overwhelmed. His thumb hovers over the button on the phone, but his brain kicks in just before he presses it, turning the phone to face the floor. It’s unlikely the light of the screen could be seen through his jacket, but better safe than sorry. He cautiously presses it and sees the screen light up the floor in front of his face. Not too bright, thankfully.

He holds his breath as he turns it toward himself, and then has to fight back another bout of tears when he sees that not only does it have more than half its battery life, but a signal as well. The phone might have seemed like salvation when he first got it, but if there was no signal, it wouldn’t have been any more useful to Sam than the paperclips Tony has gotten him. The fear was in the back of his mind ever since he recognized the shape of the phone hidden in the jacket, but it seems luck really is on his side today.

He swipes open the emergency call option, then debates for a moment. He thinks over his options, their likelihood of answering, their technological capabilities, and everything else he can remember about each of them, and eventually decides on an “Avengers emergency number” that Steve gave him a long time ago. He’d said the number went back to Tony, who at the time was Avengers backup. Sam’s hope now is that either the number will actually go to one of Tony’s AIs, who will then pass it on to the team no doubt looking for Tony, or the number will go directly to the team themselves.

He punches in the number, hits call, and immediately turns the volume down to the very bottom notch, hoping beyond hope that whatever HYDRA’s using to listen in on them isn’t sensitive enough to hear the sounds from the phone. It rings for less than a second before a click sounds and a soft female voice says, “Please identify yourself and state your business.”

Sam holds the phone as close to his mouth as possible and starts talking, his voice barely a breath, the quietest whisper he can manage. He hopes that whoever’s on the other end can hear him; he can’t risk speaking much louder, but judging by their continued silence, they can. 

“Listen, this is Sam Wilson. We were attacked by HYDRA on our way back to the US. They have me imprisoned now with Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Scott Lang, and Clint Barton. I don’t know where we are or what they want. They haven’t touched any of us but Tony. He’s in bad shape and he needs help. We all do. He managed to steal this phone off of a guard but they’ll figure out it’s gone soon and they’re going to be pissed. Please, pass this on to Colonel Rhodes, The Vision, anyone who’s searching for us. Trace the call if you can. I can’t tell you much; we woke up in here, there are no windows, I’ve never seen anything of the place except the cells where we’re being held. Solid concrete walls, and it’s cold. Underground maybe. None of the guards have ever said anything about where we are. Please… Tony won’t last much longer. None of us will. Help us. Trace the call, I’ll leave it on as long as I can. Just _help us_.”

There’s nothing more from the person on the other end, but the call doesn’t cut off, so Sam sets the phone down and just… waits. All of that anticipation and tension is still in his body, but with nowhere to go, and it’s making him jittery and a little nauseous, which is definitely not fun. This waiting is almost worse than the hopelessness of before, except for the desperate hope sustaining him that the whole situation will soon resolve.

The phone is going to be missed, that’s for sure. Sooner or later, its owner will realize it’s gone, and eventually, they’ll look to their prisoners. More specifically, they’ll look at Tony. Sam can only hope that it takes a while for the owner to realize it’s missing, and even longer for them to exhaust other search options before they conclude that Tony took it. When they do come for him… Sam won’t be able to do anything about it.

Except give it up, of course. Not that that will save them from the wrath of HYDRA, but it’s possible it could distract their attention, make them focus on Sam instead of Tony, or at least buy Tony some time. Obviously Tony is the only one of them who could have taken it, but if they come for him and Sam reveals that he actually has the thing, it might keep them off of Tony long enough for a rescue to arrive. Of course, they might just shoot both Tony and Sam—or all of them, for good measure—as soon as they discover the theft. There are too many unknowns here for him to possibly predict.

That dread keeps Sam on an awful edge for what feels like hours, but could be just minutes for all he knows. He’s never had a great sense of time in here, but being in this state of constant, heightened terror is making it even worse. He twitches at every tiny sound, and he feels like he’s suffocating under the jacket over his head.

It’s almost a relief when the call ends. Sam didn’t press anything on his end, so he can only assume that whoever he called successfully tracked them—that, or HYDRA knows what they were doing and have blocked the call somehow. The thought sends Sam’s anxiety through the roof, where he hadn’t thought it was possible to feel worse. He can barely force himself to stay still on the floor.

He’s debating coming out and checking on Tony. The call has ended, after all, and he’s afraid to try another, in case it really does bring HYDRA down on them faster. He could leave the phone under the jacket and go to him; it might even lessen the suspicion on him. But he also doesn’t want to leave the phone.

He doesn’t get to decide. Just as he raises the edge of the jacket to bring some fresh, cool air in on his face, there’s a rumbling, shaking tremor in the building. Sam jerks his head up, pulling the jacket off and only making a cursory effort to even cover the phone. This is it. His heart might beat out of his chest, and before he can make a single move, there’s another tremor, and the door to the prison is blasted open with an almighty crash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Left you on another cliffhanger, oops… good news is the next chapter is mostly finished, and I’ll try to finish it in the morning before my rounds start and then edit it when I get home, so that will hopefully be up tomorrow night. And there will be no more cliffhangers, I promise (only two more chapters to go!).


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unfortunately, the new rotation is busy and for the very last chapter, I probably won’t be able to stick to the daily update schedule. It’s barely started right now and I most likely won’t be able to finish and edit it before tomorrow night. But at least there’s no more cliffhangers! I’m frankly amazed I was able to do those daily updates for this story at all… after this I’ll be back to my usual “lucky if I can write one chapter per week” schedule.

Sam is on his feet in an instant and moving toward the front of his cell, readying himself to shout out, try to distract HYDRA, even reach out and try to hit them. Anything he can do to distract them from Tony, to protect Tony in any way he can. 

But though he initially raises his fists and his adrenaline spikes at the sight of armed agents in black streaming into the prison, there are large white letters across their chests and no sign of the HYDRA logo and holy shit, they’re being rescued. Sam’s legs suddenly go weak, nearly giving out on him, and he has to clutch at the bars to keep himself upright. 

He’s in a daze, watching it all happen. After the past weeks with so little happening, this much activity seems like too much to keep track of. That or Sam’s mind is just that slowed with stress and relief and probable shock. It takes him a minute to realize that someone is talking to him, and then another few moments to focus enough to get what they’re saying. They ask him to move back from the bars and he complies, letting go of the bars cautiously and pleased when he stays on his feet.

The rescuing agents attach some kind of device to the bars of his cell. It encloses the box that forms the lock to his door—Sam had never actually figured out how the locks worked, though he’d watched Tony taken in and out of his cell plenty of times—and after a few moments of a muffled grinding sound, the device is removed, the lock falls off in two pieces, and for the first time in two and a half weeks, the door to his cell swings open. 

Sam just stands where he is and stares, feeling like they’re somehow missing the enormity of the moment. He realizes he must have been staring too long when an agent grasps his arm, peering into his face. Sam blinks and tries to shake himself out of his daze with minimal success, but at least he manages to focus on the man in front of him. “Let’s get you out of here, hm?” the man says, an accent in his voice that Sam should recognize but is way too foggy to place right now.

He just nods vaguely and lets the man lead him out of the cell. That feeling in his chest swells again as he steps over the threshold of the cell and into the aisleway. He’s really free. But the moment is broken when they’re pressed to the side of the aisle to make room for an incoming stretcher and a group of medics.

“Tony,” he whispers, and turns to watch the medics as they flood into the cell next to his. Tony is still on the floor, where he collapsed after he passed the phone to Sam, and it scares Sam. For him not to have gotten up or even moved at all of the noise and the activity must mean he’s in bad shape. The thought sends an ache through his chest that seizes his lungs; after all this, everything they went through, if Tony actually dies just as rescue arrives…

The agent who still has a grip on his arm tries to pull him toward the door, but Sam resists, pulling back toward Tony’s cell, wanting to be there. Thankfully, the agent relents and lets him get close—Sam doesn’t have the strength to stay if the man were to decide he needed to leave.

The medics are surrounding Tony, on the floor and calling his name, trying to get a response. There’s too much going on in the room for Sam to tell if they get one or not, but he can see Tony shifting a bit, so he’s at least partially conscious. Then the medics are moving him, sliding a backboard beneath him and then getting him up onto the stretcher. Three different people are putting an oxygen mask over his face, sliding a blood pressure cuff around his arm, and trying to start an IV simultaneously, all while they get him situated on the stretcher and start moving.

“I—can I go with them?” Sam asks, looking around at the man holding onto him. He gets a nod and his arm is released; he barely spares a glance around to see that the others are being let out of their cells as well before he’s out the door of the prison with the stretcher. This time, he doesn’t have any time to contemplate or celebrate that he’s leaving the room he’s spent the last few weeks in. His focus is entirely on Tony.

The medics are having a rapid-fire conversation, numbers and medical assessments and questions and answers practically overlapping each other as they’re called out, but it’s all being done in another language. Sam’s not sure whether it’s better or worse that he doesn’t know exactly what they’re saying about Tony. He just walks alongside the stretcher and watches, still in a bit of a daze, listening to the tone of what’s being said and trying to judge from that whether things are okay or not, with little success. 

“Do you know what happened to him?” one of the medics says suddenly, in English, and Sam startles a little.

“Uh, not really,” he says, and then feels like he needs to defend himself. “They—they took him away every day, to another room, and then brought him back. He never said anything to us.” He’s not explaining himself well, thoughts and words all jumbled up. This is easily the most he’s said at once since the day he found out what Steve did. “He’s got a lot of bruising…” Obviously. “Um, burn marks, I think I saw on his arms.” The medics pull up Tony’s arms to examine them more closely at that. They say something to each other about them, again in another language, and Sam continues. “Something’s wrong with his right ankle. He couldn’t walk on it… like, two weeks ago. And I’m pretty sure he has broken ribs.”

The one who asked him the question nods, in understanding or thanks or maybe in polite dismissal, and Sam falls quiet, back to just watching. Tony looks like he’s straining to breathe even with the oxygen mask on. His eyes keep falling closed, and though he always blinks them back open after a few seconds, they move around restlessly, searching, like he doesn’t quite know where he is or what’s happening.

They move into some kind of elevator, go up, and it’s not until they’re out in the bright sunlight that Sam realizes he never looked around at the rest of the building they’d been held in. Not that it matters. If he can help it, he’ll never come near this place again, and he really doesn’t care what it looks like. 

Being underground with nothing but dim artificial lighting for the better part of a month has made him sensitive to the bright light, and he can’t do anything but stand and blink for a moment. It’s early evening, judging by the quality of the sunlight and the length of the shadows around them, but even that much sunlight is still enough to temporarily blind him.

When he can see again, he hurries toward the ambulance, having fallen behind Tony’s stretcher. He passes several armored vans—evidently what the rescuing agents arrived in—and has a fleeting second to wonder what’s happened to Daniel and the HYDRA operatives that held them, whether they’re dead or now prisoners themselves. He supposes the thought that they’re still alive should fill him with fear, fear that they’ll escape someday and come after him again, but… he’s already been through hell at their hands. The experience has dulled some of his ability to feel that fear.

They’re loading Tony into an ambulance when Sam catches back up, and some of the activity immediately around him gives way as the medics turn to arrange things inside the ambulance, hook IVs onto poles, put their bags away, and take out new equipment. Sam takes the opportunity to move close, up near Tony’s head. He hovers a hand over Tony’s chest, but he’s hesitant to touch him. It’s not just the fear of hurting him, but something intangible, born from all the tension between them for so long and the fact that for all that happened between them in that prison, they never once made physical contact. He ends up dropping the hand back to his side.

Instead, he bends down so his face is closer to Tony’s. Tony’s eyes are barely open, and Sam has no idea if he even knows who’s in front of him, but Sam starts talking softly anyway. “Tony, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry it took so long. I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything for you, I’m so sorry…” Tears prick his eyes and his voice cuts off, but a medic moves into the space anyway, and Sam sits down in the back as they get ready to go, resigned to watching from the sidelines. His job is done, at least for the moment.

“Are you injured?” one of the medics asks him, but when he shakes his head silently, they once again ignore him and go back to caring for Tony. Which is the way Sam prefers it, anyway. Another wave of unidentifiable, overwhelming emotion sweeps over him and he turns his head away, looking out the open doors at the back of the ambulance in time to see the others emerging from the building. He can make out Steve walking along, Scott next to him and being supported by an agent, and he assumes that the body on the other stretcher coming out is Clint. 

He should be concerned about the others, but there doesn’t seem to be any room in his mind to worry about them. He can barely organize his thoughts enough to worry about Tony and himself. And they’ll meet up at the hospital, he’s sure. He’ll find out the condition of the others sooner or later. None of them are as bad off as Tony anyway.

The medics are talking to each other again and Sam regains enough brain function for just a moment to realize they’re speaking Spanish. “Where are we?” he says out loud, to no one, and he’s a little surprised when he gets an answer.

“Outside of Marbella, Spain,” one of them tells him. “Your plane went down over Morocco, but you were transported here. The Avengers alerted the local authorities and the government when they were able to track your location. We could get here the fastest; the soldiers were at least a few hours ahead of the Avengers themselves.” Sam nods, mind filing away those details for later and already drifting off, too scattered and fuzzy to think about them any more right now.

Most of the ride to the hospital is a blur, another sign that Sam might be a little more out of it than he thinks. He stumbles a little when they finally get out of the ambulance and then follows Tony’s stretcher basically on autopilot. They’re moving into the emergency bays when something finally jolts Sam out of his fugue: Steve.

Steve is walking into the emergency bay, eyes on Tony’s stretcher and worry written all over his face, and Sam _hates_ it. Something in him snaps, and all of the reasons he was determined to keep the peace in their prison, all the things he’d realized about how no one is perfect and he should neither elevate nor condemn any one person, all of those things go out the window. 

He turns and puts both hands on Steve’s chest and shoves him, and though he’s sure even at his physical peak he couldn’t hope to stop a super soldier, Steve stumbles to a halt, surprise etched on his face. It just makes Sam angrier; how dare he be surprised, after what he revealed in that prison, what he _did_ , that Sam doesn’t want him near Tony?

“You did this,” Sam says, and his voice is strangled and weak, but he doesn’t care. “You put him in this situation. They gave you a choice and you _chose_ him, this is _your fault_.”

Steve looks down at him with grief and guilt and a healthy dose of pity, which doesn’t help matters. “Sam,” he says, but Sam shakes his head violently, trying to disguise how dizzy the motion makes him. This is too important for him to be passing out or falling over; he needs to say this to Steve.

“You did this to him and you didn’t even have a reason,” he croaks, but Steve reaches out to grasp his shoulder.

“Not one I could tell you in there,” Steve says. “I knew they were watching us and listening to us. If I revealed that I did it for a reason and not out of some… petty revenge, I was afraid they’d kill him.”

Sam shakes his head again, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to hear this; doesn’t want there to be a reason. Nothing can excuse what Steve did in there and he doesn’t want to listen to empty justifications that he knows won’t be enough.

But Steve is continuing, beseeching, and Sam doesn’t have the energy or the power to not listen. “Sam, I don’t like it any more than you do, but Tony had the best chance of getting us out of there. I knew it and so did he. We… we had an agreement, a long time ago. Tony talked about this happening, something like this, at least. He made me promise, if we were ever in that situation, that I’d let him be the one to go, or to provoke them into taking him, however it worked out. I didn’t want to agree, I hated the idea, but… he was right and we both knew it. He’s always been smarter than any of us, and he’s found a way out of a similar situation before. He had the best chance.”

Sam makes a choked sound. “An agreement? You mean back when he actually trusted that you had his back, before you betrayed him?” Steve flinches at that and Sam’s too angry and upset to even feel satisfaction at it. “You lost any right to decide anything for him when you hid the truth from him for years. You stabbed him in the back and _now_ you suddenly decide to honor your old agreements, when it’s going to hurt him?”

Sam’s never seen someone look so imploring. “I didn’t want to hurt him,” Steve pleads. “I was trying to make the smartest decision to get us out of there. If there’d been a way to keep him out of it without lowering our chances, I’d have done it. I never wanted to see him hurt.” He’s practically begging for Sam to understand, to agree with him, but Sam can’t.

Sam shoves the heavy hand off his shoulder, frustrated tears welling up in his eyes and threatening to spill over. “I don’t care,” he says, and wraps his arms around himself as though they can protect him from the emotional turmoil, stepping back from Steve before he can open his mouth to respond. Sam repeats it like a mantra, “I don’t care. I don’t care what you thought you were doing. I don’t care if you were making the ‘smartest’ decision. I don’t give a shit about your justifications. You weren’t the one who had to sit there every day and watch him deteriorate. You weren’t the one he was risking himself to smuggle stuff to, you didn’t have to sit there with tools that he probably could have used to escape in a minute but you didn’t know what to do with, you didn’t have to feel useless and disappointing. You weren’t the one right next to him, trying to help him and not being able to do _anything_ , you weren’t the one he was depending on and you failed him, I failed him, I—I _failed_ —” 

He’s hyperventilating and his voice is rising, attracting the attention of doctors and nurses around them, and oh, here comes that breakdown that’s long overdue. Steve steps toward him, a hand held out like he wants to help, and Sam cannot deal with Steve’s attitude right now, with his need to try and help when Sam just wants to hate him, wants him to _go away_.

He doesn’t realize he’s saying it out loud, “go away, please just go away,” he’s mumbling, until there are hands on his shoulders from behind, steering him around and onto the edge of a gurney. His limbs are like jelly, he can’t control them and he’s grateful for the timely intervention. He doesn’t want to just collapse on the floor in front of Steve.

“Tony?” he blindly asks whoever’s in front of him.

“He is being taken care of,” a woman says, and Sam opens eyes he hadn’t realized were closed to see a doctor in front of him. “I think you need some help yourself.” He nods, the dizziness coming back full force.

He sort of greys out for a while, letting the world fade into nothing but occasional hands touching him, once or twice the sharp prick of a needle, the soft rumble of voices in the background that he doesn’t care to distinguish from one another, most of them speaking Spanish or another language anyway. He focuses on the strange tingling in his fingers and toes and trying to breathe like a normal person. At one point he’s guided to lie down and doesn’t resist. Even the relatively stiff gurney he’s on is heaven compared to his cold concrete cell, and when a warm blanket is draped over him, he sinks even further toward unconsciousness.

Eventually, he does force his eyes back open. His breathing has calmed down and the anxious feeling has abated a reasonable amount, enough that he feels like if he sits up he won’t immediately fall back down again. He pushes himself warily into a sitting position and looks around.

He’s still in the emergency department, he assumes, by the semi-private “room.” There’s a wall to one side of him and behind his bed, but the other two sides are just a large curtain pulled between what he guesses is him and another bed. He can hear the sounds of machinery and dozens of different voices out in the halls and at patients’ beds, all combining into a background noise that he can only describe as “hospital.” 

He’s just contemplating trying to unhook the IV bag he’s attached to from its pole so he can wander when there’s a knock and the edge of his curtain is pulled back. A nurse pokes his head into the gap and smiles at Sam. “Mr. Wilson, you’re awake! How are you feeling?”

Sam scrubs at his face, suddenly aware that he probably looks like hell. “Okay,” he says, and his voice comes out a little hoarse. The nurse smiles and hands him a cup of water from the bedside stand he hadn’t noticed before. When he’s gotten rid of his dry mouth and cleared his throat, he tries again. “I’m okay. What happened to the others?”

“Your friends are close by. Everyone is okay. You can see them if you would like, but first, would you like me to take you to shower?”

Right. Sam hasn’t been able to shower in two and a half weeks, and he’s been wearing the same clothes the entire time. He wants to find the others, wants to make sure Tony’s okay, but now that the nurse has mentioned it, he can’t think of anything else but being clean. “Yes, please,” he says, so emphatically that the nurse chuckles.

“Let me unhook you, then. We’ve taken blood for all the labs we need and I see your fluids are finished,” he gestures to the IV, “but you need to make sure you drink plenty of water. You were dehydrated and a little nutrient deficient when you came in, plus mildly hypothermic. You were all suffering from exposure and dehydration.”

Sam nods, not surprised at that. The nurse finishes taking out his IV and pulls the curtain back, and Sam sees that he’s in a sort of alcove off of the main hallway, with two beds on either side and curtains between them. He can’t see the bed next to him, but across from him is an open curtain dividing Steve and Scott. Both are hooked up to IVs as well; Scott is sitting back in his bed, eyes closed, but Steve is perched on the edge of his like he might jump up any moment, and he does in fact stand when he sees Sam.

Sam can’t stop himself from looking away even when Steve smiles at the sight of him. Sam’s still angry at him, and he knows there’s a lot they need to talk about. He does also figure he owes him a small apology for before, but mostly he’s just embarrassed. He had a bit of a breakdown when they first got here. As Sam gets up from the bed to follow the nurse, Steve takes a hesitant step forward from his bed. “Hey, you’re up.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, still staring at Steve’s bed instead of looking right at him. Looking him in the eyes right now would make it too hard to keep his calm and have a normal conversation. “How long was I out?”

“Not long,” Steve says, “maybe an hour. They gave you something, for… anxiety, I think.” The awkward air would probably be there anyway, just because of the reminder of what happened an hour ago, but Steve’s tone isn’t helping.

“Okay. Well… shower,” he says, gesturing at the nurse and then turning his back on Steve. Once they round the corner, he cringes. That could have gone better. Of course, it could have ended in him yelling and panicking again, or just punching Steve, but he hopes this isn’t how every single conversation is going to be from now on. He could swear he was once good at talking to people.

The shower is heavenly. He never thought something so simple could make him so damn happy, but when he gets out he feels like a new person, his head clearer than before. He’s taken back to his bed, back to where Steve is pacing in front of his as far as his IV line will let him go. 

“You should get some rest, all of you,” the nurse says to Sam and then to Steve as well, but Steve steps forward.

“I’d like to see Tony.” He says it in that authoritative tone that usually gets him what he wants, and without even waiting to hear the nurse’s answer, Sam steps up into his space. 

“After what you did to him? No way.”

“Sam,” Steve says, and there’s a slight warning in his tone and the grief is back in his eyes, but Sam doesn’t care, turning back to the nurse. 

“If anyone is going to him, I should. I—I’d like to stay with him, if I can. It’s… I just want to make sure he’s okay.” He doesn’t say _he’s my responsibility_ , but it’s certainly implied.

However, before the nurse can say anything to either of them, a new voice speaks up. “Actually, I think that’s _my_ job.”

Sam blinks, startled, as the voice precedes Colonel James Rhodes around the corner. He strikes an imposing figure in his military uniform and with his fierce expression. The braces on his legs, while certainly a marvel of engineering, send a pang of painful guilt through Sam. But mostly, he’s just stunned. The Avengers, of course, the ones who were just a few hours behind the agents who rescued them. Sam had known they were coming, certainly knew they were out looking for Tony, but somehow, in the last few weeks with just his “team” and Tony, it’s been easy to forget that other people exist. That Sam’s not the only person on the planet who’s trying to look out for Tony Stark.

The glare Rhodes is aiming at both him and Steve is a shock as well, until Sam remembers that life, in fact, existed before their capture. And that before that—and now, as far as Rhodes knows—Sam was just Steve’s yes man, just another one of the assholes who betrayed Tony and then ran off to Wakanda and left him to clean up their messes. To Rhodes, they’re all traitors.

Rhodes addresses the nurse. “He’s out of CT, they’ve moved him upstairs, they want him on an observation unit for at least a day,” he says, and the nurse nods. “Ms. Potts is on her way here now.” Rhodes levels another venomous glare at Sam and Steve and then says pointedly, “ _I_ am his medical proxy, and I’d like to make it clear that _no one_ but myself or Ms. Potts is to be privy to any of Tony’s medical information until he wakes and can make his own decisions about that. I’ll be with him until he wakes up.”

“Of course,” the nurse says with a polite nod, while Steve recoils a little.

“Please, just… tell me he’s okay,” Sam says quietly, and Rhodes looks at him. “We fucked up, I know it, we fucked up badly, but he got us out of there and I just… want to know that he’s okay.” He’s not articulating well, but he’s honest, at least.

Rhodes just stares at him for a long time, expression unreadable. “I’ll have them let you know when he’s awake,” he says finally, and Sam’s heart climbs up a little from where it had settled around his feet. “If and _only_ if Tony says it’s okay,” he adds.

Sam nods. That’s perfectly fair, and though Rhodes doesn’t know what went on in that prison, Sam understands that he’s very lucky Rhodes is extending this kindness at all. He could lock all of them out of Tony’s life if he wanted to. Hell, if he finds out what Steve did in there, he could probably have every one of them arrested, or at least kicked off the Avengers permanently. Sam knows that he’s potentially being given a chance that he doesn’t necessarily deserve, and he won’t waste it. “Thank you,” he says, and though Rhodes’s frosty expression doesn’t waver, he also doesn’t say anything else, and Sam counts that as a win. Rhodes turns and leaves without another word and there’s a moment of silence before their nurse leaves as well.

“Sam,” Steve says behind him, and Sam tenses a little before turning to face him. “I never wanted Tony to get hurt. I hope you know that.”

Sam doesn’t want to deal with this, this moral gray area. Steve chose Tony for torture, consciously and knowing the consequences. No long-past “agreement” or reasoning will change that fact, and knowing now what he knows about Steve’s willingness to lie and betray a friend, it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t some intention to it, some relief that it was _Tony_ who was “best suited” instead of one of the people he clearly likes better. 

But as much as Sam wants to dismiss it, there’s truth to what Steve said. Sam himself thought more than once during the whole ordeal that Tony was by far the most likely to find them a way out of there. Steve appears genuine in his remorse, and he certainly was upset when HYDRA kept taking Tony. Actions speak louder than words, but… it might be hypocritical of Sam to judge Steve when until their capture, he’d been just as dismissive and angry at Tony as all the rest of them. He’d had his head shoved just as far up his ass, and he hadn’t wanted to see the truth.

He doesn’t have an answer right now. He might not for a long time. But Steve is looking for something, maybe absolution, and Sam can’t give that to him. “It all worked out, like you wanted,” he says instead of giving a real answer, and he knows Steve can hear the tension in his voice. “We got out, we’re all alive.” 

That’s the most Sam wants to say about the subject right now, with Steve. Hoping for a distraction, he looks around. Scott is still in his bed, resting, but when Sam turns back to look at his own, he notices the one next to his is empty. “Where’s Clint?”

Steve hesitates, clearly wanting to talk more about Tony, but relents after a few seconds. “He’s in isolation, just for now they said. He has pneumonia and they’re not sure exactly what bug it is. He’s on something to help him breathe better and he’s getting fluids and vitamins, but he should be fine, they said.”

Sam turns to look at Scott and Steve continues without being asked. “Scott’s okay, just dehydrated and hypothermic like, uh, like you. And tired. I don’t think he slept much in there. He hasn’t said a lot since we got out, I think they’re bringing a psychiatrist to evaluate him.”

Which makes sense. Sam doesn’t doubt that they’ll all be seeing psychiatry soon, after that kind of trauma and prolonged imprisonment. It would probably be helpful for Sam to talk through some of these new moral issues with a therapist, at the very least. “And you?” he finally asks, at least extending that tiny olive branch to Steve.

“I’m okay. I mean, the serum kind of… made up for everything. Kept me going like normal. The doctors said I just created a deficit and now I have to eat about ten thousand calories a day for at least a week to make up for it.”

Sam resists the urge to scoff and just nods instead. Of course Steve’s fine. There’s no karmic retribution for him sending Tony off to endure horrific things yet still work to find them a way out of there, while Steve sat safe in his cell and didn’t even suffer from the same lack of food and water that the rest of them did. Bitterness rises in Sam and he squashes it down, partly knowing he’s still in no shape to be judging and starting arguments, mostly just too tired to deal with it.

“Well, they said we should get some rest, so… I’ll just do that,” he says flatly, turning to go back to his bed. He pulls the curtain around his bed for at least the illusion of privacy—and hopefully the pointed message that he doesn’t want Steve bothering him—and flops onto his bed with a heavy sigh.

They’re out, but nothing is really fixed. They’re not going to die any time soon and Tony can heal now instead of getting worse every day, but… he’s not sure how to move forward from here. Back in the cells, escape had been the singular goal, to the point that Sam hadn’t really planned for what would happen when they did get out. Now he’s a little lost. How do they go back to normal life after this? Nothing is the same. At least, not for him.

He’s left alone, and maybe it’s the drugs still in his system, but despite all his worries, he’s out quickly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a disclaimer, I have no idea what hospitals in Spain look like or how they operate, so I’m patterning this off of some of the ones I rotate at here in the US. The little alcove of a few “rooms” really exists at one ED where I consulted on the OB/GYN service.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, the final chapter! I am sorry about this last chapter taking so long relative to the other ones, but hey, it was still less than a week, I consider that decent. Now I can focus on re-learning all of the neuro stuff I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten so I can pass my shelf exam and move on. Two months of surgery after this, which is a hellish rotation in terms of hours, so I’m hoping to at least get one or two more chapters of Electric Veins in before that happens. I doubt I’ll have any time to write during that rotation.
> 
> I’m thinking about writing a sort-of sequel to this covering Tony’s point of view through the whole thing. It would be shorter, and I’d still have to plan the whole thing out (right now it’s just a vague idea), plus it definitely wouldn’t be written right away (I owe everyone like a million updates to Electric Veins and the Bitter Retribution series before that) but I have a few little ideas/quotes that I already know I’d want in there. I’m still not sure about it, but I figured I’d throw it out there in case anyone really wants more out of this.

Sam is woken some time later by a hand on his shoulder and a voice saying his name. He rises slowly from the hazy depths of sleep, this time not because of chronic exhaustion or a desire to avoid facing the day ahead, but just because he’s so comfortable. For the first time in weeks, he’s sleeping on something soft, he’s warm, and his mouth isn’t cotton-dry and sticky from dehydration. 

He sighs and burrows a little deeper into the warm spot on his bed, but the voice says his name again, and he gives up and peels his eyes open. There’s a nurse at the side of his bed, smiling down at him even as he gives her a sleepy half-glare. “I am sorry to wake you,” she says, “but I need to take your vital signs again. Also, you have food.” She steps back to gesture at his rolling bedside table, on which is a tray full of food.

That wakes Sam up all the way; he sits up so fast that his head spins a little. Real food, variety in it… right now it’s even more exciting than the shower was earlier. The nurse holds out a thermometer before he can make a move for the food, but lets him eat while she does the rest, which he’s grateful for. He savors every bite, every new flavor, even though he knows it must look a little ridiculous to be so happy over relatively bland hospital food. He doesn’t care.

He eats probably faster than he should, but it’s not an unreasonable amount of food and he doesn’t feel sick afterward, so he counts it as a win. Just as he’s finishing, the nurse says, “by the way, Mr. Stark is awake and has given his permission for you to see him. I can take you up there in a minute.”

Sam practically leaps up at that. His first instinct is to ask why she didn’t lead with that, but it occurs to him that it was probably intentional. If they wanted him to eat and sit still while she took his blood pressure, they needed to do it all before telling him he can see Tony. Besides, the coming meeting could be… uncomfortable, to say the least, and it’s probably better that he’s fed and as healthy as possible for it.

Still, he can’t help but shift impatiently from foot to foot as the nurse goes to the computer to input his vitals, then flips through his chart to mark something down, before _finally_ coming back to lead him to Tony. They leave the emergency department entirely and go up a few floors to one of the wards, winding through hallways that Sam already feels lost in before stopping outside a room. “I’ll leave you to it,” the nurse says kindly. “When you’re ready to go back, someone at the desk at the end of the hall can show you the way back down.” She leaves, and by the time Sam thinks to turn and thank her for bringing him up, she’s too far down the hall.

The door is closed. He raises his hand to knock, but pauses, suddenly feeling like it’s some insurmountable obstacle. There are so many things he needs to say, but his mind is working too fast or too slow—he’s not entirely sure which—to put them in the right order or to make them come out as real words. In that prison, bridging the gap between him and Tony had been a matter of necessity and survival. Now, with all of them safe for the moment and real life coming back whether he wants it to or not, that gap seems a lot bigger.

Before he can lose the nerve, he knocks on the door. “Come in,” a voice says from inside, and Sam takes a quick breath and opens the door.

It’s a room like any other, though a private one, which is good. Not just considering the need to heal and the recent traumas its occupant has been through, but also for security purposes. A thought half-forms in Sam’s brain that before all of this, back when he judged Tony automatically and without thinking, he’d have seen the private room as an unnecessary expression of Tony’s wealth or perceived sense of importance, instead of an obvious security measure to help control the number of strangers who have access to a weakened Iron Man. The shame that thought brings him just adds to the nauseating mix of guilt and regret churning his stomach. He’s beginning to question the wisdom of eating his first full meal in weeks right before coming up here. 

Tony’s propped up in one of the ubiquitous hospital beds, awake and looking at Sam. Rhodes and Potts are seated on either side of him, each holding one of his hands. It momentarily surprises Sam, and he’s not sure why. He doesn’t know why he expected the room to be empty, but of course they won’t leave him alone; of course, Tony’s girlfriend (they’re back together, Sam knows that much, he saw it on one of the million news channels and internet sites that love to cover every aspect of Tony’s life, and there’s another guilty thought, that he’d never understood why Potts would want to be in a relationship with a man like Tony but God, he understands now) and his best friend (because that’s what Rhodes is, without question, all of the Avengers used to act like the man who wears the War Machine suit just puts up with Tony for his gadgets and his suit, but they were all just projecting their own feelings onto him, Rhodes has stuck by Tony for decades, he was friends with him long before Tony ever built a suit, and everyone knows about the lengths Rhodes went to when Tony was lost in Afghanistan, but somehow they all managed to forget that) wouldn’t leave Tony alone with someone who, until very recently, was no better than an enemy to Tony, a villain. 

It should make the encounter harder, and maybe it does, just a little. Maybe there’s a little bit of intimidation in them being here, but right now all Sam can see is Tony. Back in their prison, even when he was practically unconscious on a dirty floor, there was something almost untouchable, unreachable, about Tony, beyond the physical separation of the bars. But now, here, with no obstacles between them except emotional ones, Sam can’t help but see how vulnerable and real Tony is. Sitting in the bed bruised and scraped and broken, exhausted bags beneath his eyes and pain written on his features even despite the medications Sam’s sure he’s on. He’s wearing a hospital gown that hangs off him, nearly every inch of his skin around the gown is covered in wraps and sterile dressings, Sam can see a brace on one wrist and the bulk of what’s probably a cast beneath the blankets down at his injured ankle, and he looks so painfully, unbearably _human_.

Sam’s throat tightens instantly, which is probably good because there’s bile trying to rise up behind it. Tears begin to sting his eyes, which is more annoying than embarrassing because they’re in the way of Sam getting his thoughts out. He can also tell just from glances at Rhodes and Potts that his tears won’t be appreciated, not by them at least, these real friends of Tony’s. What does his guilt mean to them when he’s so thoroughly screwed up, when Tony is in this position in part because of him? 

He has a moment to wonder when Tony woke up and how much he’s had time to tell Potts and Rhodes about what happened. Tony might very well try to protect Potts from some of the more gruesome details of what’s happened to him, but Sam has no doubt that sooner or later, Rhodes will know it all. It’s possible Sam could appear somewhat sympathetic—he did try to help, after all—but his efforts weren’t enough and he knows it. Once the whole truth is in someone else’s hands, it’ll be up to them to judge him, and Sam has a sinking feeling he won’t be coming out in a good light.

Sam forces a hard swallow, just enough to make his voice work. He means to ask what happened, how Tony’s feeling, if he’s being taken care of. But as soon as he opens his mouth, what comes out is a choked, twisted approximation of a sob. “I’m so sorry,” he says, and the words open a floodgate. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t do anything for you. We all fucked you over and then we got in there and we fucked you over again, I sat there and I let you go, I didn’t do anything, and I stopped trying to—I couldn’t—it took me so long just to figure out the stupid jacket and what you were trying to do, I’m so sorry, and then you got me all that—all that stuff and I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do with it, I’m sorry, I know you could have done so much with it but I couldn’t do _anything_ , I—”

He has to force himself to stop, gulp in a breath, and dig his fingernails into his arms until the pain drives away the tears that want to fall. He’s becoming incoherent and he’s definitely on the wrong side of the edge of another breakdown, but this is not the time. There’s too much to say and to find out, and Christ, breaking down in front of Tony right now seems so incredibly selfish. What is what he’s been through compared to what Tony has suffered? 

Tony, however, is shaking his head slightly in the bed. His eyes are drooping with exhaustion, but there’s a small, tired attempt at a smile on his face that looks more like a grimace than anything. Sam supposes he’s trying to be reassuring, but the fact that he can’t make it convincing just makes Sam feel worse. Still, Tony opens his mouth to speak, and though his voice is rough and quiet and pained, it’s sincere.

“It’s okay, Wilson, really. You tried, which… I admit is more than I expected.” Sam flinches at that, but he knows he deserves it. That Tony ever trusted him in any capacity is a damn miracle. “And I didn’t really expect you to be able to do anything with what I got you. I got what I could, but you’re not an engineer or an electrician. We both know you’re no Tony Stark.” 

The joke falls incredibly flat. The smile Tony’s tentatively holding drops off his face and he looks away at the same time Sam does. Neither of them can make eye contact with each other, the memories too uncomfortable, the strange half-truce too unclear. The effort Sam made is nowhere near enough to make up for everything else, but it’s more than any of the others did, and it was something that helped allow their eventual escape. But standing here confessing his shortcomings is making the situation awkward. They both know that what both of them said is true, yet none of it changes what happened.

Unfortunately, looking away from Tony brings Sam’s eyes to Rhodes, and he sees when Rhodes processes the words and practically lunges up from his chair, braces on his legs whirring, at the confirmation that Sam could have done something more to help Tony in that hell and didn’t. Evidently Tony hasn’t told them much yet. Sam flinches away, guilt written in every line of his body, and he knows it only fuels Rhodes’s anger. But Rhodes only manages to half-rise from the chair before he’s tugged back down by the grip Tony has on his hand. Eyes on Sam and murder written in his expression, Rhodes reluctantly sits back down. When he glances over at Tony, Tony gives him the same pathetic, sad smile he gave Sam and shakes his head, and Rhodes leans back, clearly disgruntled.

There’s a moment of awkward silence, in which he contemplates how little he deserves this defense from Tony, before Sam manages to find his voice again. “You… you never said anything.” It comes out as a statement, but he knows Tony can hear the question in it. He can see Potts and Rhodes watching Tony sharply, clearly curious now.

Tony swallows and something dark crosses his features, something that Sam instinctively wants to shy away from. “They told me on day one they’d execute anyone I tried to communicate with,” he says, in a terrifyingly flat voice. “I didn’t think I should test how serious they were.”

Potts puts one hand over her mouth silently, but she straightens her back in a show of strength and Sam can see her squeeze Tony’s hand. Rhodes puts his other hand on Tony’s shoulder, and for just a second, Tony closes his eyes and leans his cheek into the hand. But he forces his eyes back open and picks his head up after a short moment, looking back at Sam with more life in his expression. When he speaks, his voice has a little more emotion in it. 

“I’m sorry, about risking you like that. Passing your coat back and forth, they could have counted that as communicating, but it was the only thing I could think to use to pass things to you and since you offered it…” Tony says, but he’s shushed by Sam, Potts, and Rhodes all simultaneously. 

Sam’s the one who actually says something. “Don’t. Don’t be sorry; it was the only thing you could have done. None of us had anything, any plan. We couldn’t… stuck in those cells, we didn’t have any opportunities. Anything you could do… you shouldn’t have had that on your shoulders, but you did. And whatever you had to do to get out of there, that’s—it’s okay.”

Tony looks away again. “That doesn’t make it okay,” he mumbles, and Sam’s heart twists with guilt and something else. Maybe agreement, because those are the kinds of things he’s been thinking about himself and Steve in the last few weeks. He’s been trying to overcome the double standards and the biases that have led him to such monumental lapses in judgment, and if he really wants to learn from that, he knows it needs to apply to everyone. Tony’s right, in a way. Sam still thinks that it was worth the risk, but if it had been him in that situation, he’d still have felt guilty about potentially risking HYDRA’s wrath by pushing the boundaries of disobeying their command not to communicate. He can certainly see why Tony is feeling guilty, even if Sam thinks it’s more than justified.

But he also can’t help but see the long, assessing look Rhodes is giving him. He might be imagining it, but there might just be the tiniest scrap of approval in his expression now, for Sam absolving Tony of any blame for risking him in there. It makes sense, he supposes, in the context that Tony hasn’t had time to tell Rhodes many, if any, of the details of what happened in there. If this is the first Rhodes is hearing of any of this, then odds are it’s not so much approval of Sam on a deep personal level, but rather the pleasant surprise of seeing evidence that Sam has finally pulled his head out of his ass where Tony’s concerned.

He opens his mouth to say something else, he’s not sure what. Something to continue this discussion, to try to help Tony understand how grateful Sam is to him and how much Sam has changed, but he’s interrupted by a quiet knock on the door behind him.

No one says anything this time, but the door opens anyway. Sam turns automatically, expecting a nurse or a doctor, and freezes at the sight of Steve walking in. Steve has a tentative smile on his face like he’s expecting any kind of friendly reception here, and Sam quickly looks away before Steve can meet his eyes. He’s not sure he can deal with Steve right now.

Naturally, he looks toward the bed, and can immediately see that Tony looks highly uncomfortable. If he looked pained and wary before, it was nothing compared to now. He’s tense and clearly wound tight, and Sam sees Rhodes very deliberately take his hand off Tony’s shoulder and put it on the side rail of the bed instead; his knuckles blanch a moment later with the strength of his grip.

Sam’s thinking about what happened in the last few weeks, imagining how angry they must be about what Steve did to Tony in the prison, when it occurs to him that Tony probably hasn’t told them about that yet. This anger, clearly showing in Rhodes’s tightly coiled posture and Potts’s frosty expression and pursed lips, is about Siberia. It’s about the Accords and their fight and the way Steve decided to make everyone choose sides instead of recognizing that Tony was trying to help the Avengers and just _talking_ like a normal person.

Sam’s anger is swelling again, thinking about all of that and now the new insults on top of it, but he deflates after another moment. What right does he have to be angry on Tony’s behalf? A desperate situation forcing him to rethink his choices is hardly an absolution for him. With Rhodes and Potts in the room, Sam can no longer claim to be the one who’s the most understanding and kind to Tony, the way he could back in their prison. Sam betrayed Tony too, after all.

He reflects for a long, depressing moment on how _righteous_ he’d felt when they were pardoned, what now feels like a lifetime ago. When they were on that plane coming home, he’d been expecting a happy landing and a return to how things had been before. He’d had his head buried so far in the sand that he hadn’t even cared about the vicious protests he’d been outright told they’d encounter on their return. He’d never once bothered to think that those protests meant that people were against him, that there were normal people out there who looked at his actions and saw a traitor.

He’d been too consumed with pointless, undeserved anger at Tony. He’d actually expected an apology from Tony, and he wants to both laugh and cry at his own presumption, his ignorance. He understands now that they’re the ones who owe Tony an apology, all of them. An apology that they’ve done nothing to earn the chance to give. 

Come to think of it, Sam has no idea what any of the others think about this entire situation. They were all pissed when they found out Steve lied to them about Siberia and Tony, but that doesn’t mean they’ve come to the same conclusions Sam has about Tony and the Avengers. Clint had a pretty deep personal grudge against Tony, it seemed. Will it still be there once he’s back at the Compound? And what about Wanda and Barnes—they don’t know what happened in there, and even if they’re told the details, it won’t be the same as actually living through it. Barnes knows what happened in Siberia, he was there, but after all, no matter how terrible a trauma he’d just been through, Tony _did_ attack him. Sam can’t exactly blame Barnes if he’s not a fan of the guy. And Wanda hates Tony, plain and simple, Sam can admit that now. Steve never seemed to care, that or he was just in denial, because he constantly made excuses for her. The rest of them just ignored it, because… because they thought Tony deserved it, Sam supposes. Because they were ignorant assholes who didn’t care how much misery Wanda caused Tony as long as she was nice enough to the rest of them. 

The cycle of anger and guilt and more anger in Sam’s head fades when Steve shifts awkwardly, maybe catching sight of the unforgiving looks he’s getting from Potts and Rhodes. Tony, for his part, just looks tired. Resigned, the same way he did when Steve chose him to be dragged off by HYDRA. Sam hates that look.

“Hey, Tony. It’s good to see you up. Are… you okay?” Steve pauses uncomfortably when Tony doesn’t say anything, doesn’t answer him or ask about Steve’s health in return. And Sam is instantly sure that Rhodes doesn’t know what Steve has done, at least not beyond Siberia, because he’s sitting ramrod straight in his chair, eyes flicking back and forth between Tony and Steve like he knows very well that something is going on but can’t quite figure out what. 

Never one to take a hint, Steve just barrels forward even through Tony’s silence. “What…” Steve stops and Sam can see him swallow, eyes flicking over to Sam briefly before going back to Tony. “What did they want? What—what were they asking you?”

Steve has guts, asking that. Sam thinks it’s invasive and presumptuous, but he can also admit that he’s curious as to the answer. By the way they sit still and attentive, Sam can bet that Potts and Rhodes are wondering, too. Evidently they know the basics of what HYDRA did to Tony but not why.

Sam’s imagining a dozen different scenarios, tons of information that they could have wanted from Tony. About the Avengers, about Tony’s company, about the government and Tony’s connections, his technology, SHIELD, anything. Suddenly, thinking about all of that, Sam can’t imagine how Tony could have held out that long and told them nothing. His mind goes into overdrive, wondering what kind of false information he might have told them to buy some time, or how they dealt with it, but Tony’s answer stops him short.

“Nothing.”

Steve blinks, confused, and Sam knows there’s an equally confused expression on his own face. “Nothing?” Steve asks.

“Nothing,” Tony repeats, voice soft and flat again. “They didn’t ask me anything. I’m sure it would have been a bonus if I’d shouted out some kind of important information to try and get them to stop, but I didn’t. I’d never have given anything up and they knew it.”

It’s obvious Steve doesn’t understand. Sam doesn’t either. “Then what did they want?”

Tony looks up at Steve for once, instead of staring at the wall behind him like he has been. There’s some unidentifiable mix of emotions in his eyes. “They wanted me to suffer, and for you to suffer because of it. They wanted to hurt me, and they wanted you to feel like it was your fault.”

Which it was. “Why?” Steve practically whispers.

“Because they wanted to break down the Avengers. Finish what Zemo started. They knew what he’d done and they approved, because it would wreck the Avengers, tear down their public image and their internal structure. But then I went and pissed them off, because I built something new from that, and I took responsibility for myself,” there’s acidity in the words that Sam knows is well-deserved, but he can’t help but wince at them, “and I promised the public I’d make it up to them, and be there for them. And then, to add injury to insult for the people rooting for our destruction, I went and brought you all back. We were going to be one big, happy family again, and they didn’t like that.”

The way Tony says the bit about being a family makes it incredibly obvious what he thinks of the idea. Here, in this room with just them, he can let that mask slip, stop pretending for a minute that he actually wants any of the people who betrayed him back in his life. It confirms what Sam realized back in their prison, that Tony had done it all for the sake of the public and the name of the Avengers and not for any of them personally. Sam can’t help but notice that he keeps saying “the Avengers,” not “us,” and he knows exactly why.

Tony takes a breath and continues. “So they decided they needed to drive the knife in deeper, hit those cracks harder, and they took a page out of Zemo’s book to do it. They knew about Siberia, they knew that I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me, and they were counting on it. So they constructed a scenario where they could use that to their advantage, and you did exactly what they wanted you to.”

The way Tony says it isn’t accusatory or angry. It’s just a flat statement of truth and Sam knows it. Steve, though, still flounders. “Tony… I’m sorry.” Although the apology should be a good thing, a decent first step at least, Sam’s pretty sure it’s the first time Steve’s actually said that to Tony, and it just drives home the clear truth: that HYDRA didn’t have to try very hard to break them apart. They only had to give Steve a reason.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” Steve says, repeating what he’s already told Sam. Rhodes makes a disbelieving noise, but Tony just stares at Steve. “I—they made me choose someone to go, and I knew you were the best bet. I remembered what you told me a long time ago, about what to do if we were ever in a situation like that. I didn’t want to do it, but you said yourself you had the best chance of getting us out of there. I’m sorry, Tony, I really am. You’re my friend and I didn’t want to choose you. I had to.”

“You _chose_ him?” Rhodes says loudly, and Sam actually takes a step back at hearing the fury in his voice. “You mean they gave you a choice, and you fucking _picked him_? You son of a—” Rhodes does leap up this time. He takes one lurching, enraged step toward Steve, and Tony lets go of Potts’s hand to use both to try and hold Rhodes back. There’s no way Tony has the leverage or the strength to stop him, but he tries. And when the movement and effort forces a short, sharp cry of pain from him, Rhodes whirls around, anger replaced by worry so fast that Sam thinks he might get whiplash just from watching it, and sits on the edge of Tony’s bed, pushing him gently back into the pillow with both hands on his shoulders. His attention goes entirely to soothing Tony.

Unfortunately for Tony’s apparent desire to protect Steve in this, grabbing Rhodes has freed Potts. Sam wouldn’t have expected the strong, sharply contained fury she shows as she stands and gets into Steve’s space—preventing him from stepping closer to Tony like he clearly wants to—but he should have. She’s a successful female CEO in a ruthless, sexist world of cutthroat business, after all, and despite what the internet and the media loved to try and claim, Tony hadn’t promoted her like that because he was thinking with his dick. She’d deserved the position, and she’s certainly proven that in the years since.

Now, she stands in front of Steve, easily a foot shorter than him and looking up, but she towers over him in personality. Her cold anger makes a beautiful and terrible counterpart to Rhodes’s uncontained rage as she regards Steve with utter disdain. “Pepper,” he says quietly, uncertain and small. Even Steve is cowed by this woman.

Even with how strong and how angry she obviously is, Sam’s not expecting her to haul back and slap Steve across the face, hard. The shock keeps Sam completely still, and it seems to do the same to Steve. He takes several seconds to even turn his head back from where it’s snapped to the side, and he won’t meet her eyes. “Don’t you _ever_ claim to be his _friend_ again,” she says, and her low, icy voice doesn’t waver or break. The danger in it doesn’t give way to any emotion. She looks him over with disgust one more time, then turns back to the bed and to Tony, dismissing Steve and wiping the hand she used to hit him on her perfectly tailored jacket like she touched something filthy.

Tony’s been occupied with Rhodes and with breathing through whatever pain he just caused himself, but it’s clear he heard Potts slap Steve. He eyes her with something between exasperation and fondness, but he doesn’t say anything, perhaps not wanting to provoke her wrath. It’s not like she could do real damage to Steve, and anyway, he deserved it. Sam knows it, Tony and Rhodes know it, and Sam’s pretty sure, by Steve’s subdued posture, that he knows it too.

Rhodes turns and makes a jerking move like he wants to go for Steve again, but Tony grabs his sleeve and he sits back reluctantly, looking back at Tony, who shakes his head. “The modern art principle, Rhodey.” It’s all he says, and it makes no sense to Sam, but Rhodes deflates. He sits back—though he remains on Tony’s bed instead of moving back to his chair—and renews his grip on Tony’s hand with a heavy sigh. 

“This stays here,” Tony says, a little louder, clearly addressing all of them. Steve finally looks back up at that. “No one outside this room and the people who were there can ever know what went on in there. We’ll figure out what to say later, but no one can ever know what happened in there. No one can know that one of us sold another one out to HYDRA.”

Steve flinches at that and opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but thankfully, he doesn’t. Sam’s sure that whatever would have come out would not be good, and Sam has a feeling he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from being next in line to hit Steve. He’s still on edge and itching for a fight.

Tony glances between Sam and Steve. He must see something reluctant or argumentative in Steve’s face, because his expression hardens. “No one can ever know about it,” he repeats, more firmly. “Tell me you understand why.”

“Because people would lose faith in us,” Steve mumbles.

“Not us,” Sam says, and everyone looks at him, “in heroes. In the idea of the Avengers.” When Steve just gives him a confused look, he grits his teeth and admits the truth. “We’re replaceable. But the Avengers, the idea of a team of heroes, isn’t. When everything eventually goes to hell someday, we’ll need the people to believe in us, and if they find out about this… they never will.”

Rhodes is giving him that look again, like he doesn’t want to admit he approves of Sam. Sam can’t really take any pleasure in it. 

Tony’s nodding his agreement, eyes on Steve. “Exactly. That’s the endgame. That’s the important thing. We can have all the petty squabbles or gigantic, life-changing arguments we want behind closed doors, as long as they stay there. In the end, it doesn’t matter if we like each other. What matters is that the world thinks we do. That’s why you came back and why you’re going to live in the Compound again, even though we all know most of us would rather live on separate continents. We’re going to smile and shake hands and pretend we’re buddies again so that the people believe in us, even if the second the cameras are off we go back to stabbing each other in the back.”

That’s not a healthy way for a team to function, Sam knows, and it’s unsustainable. But Tony sounds desperate and tired and he’s right, in a way. They’re the people that the world has currently chosen to represent its heroes. Whether they like it or not, they’re stuck in this role until something changes—something other than their own personal problems tearing them apart—and if they want any hope of keeping the idea of the Avengers alive, they’re going to need to at least _pretend_ to get along and make it work. Maybe, with time and probably some intense therapy for all of them, they really can work through it.

Steve flinches away, though, from Tony’s cold, clinical analysis. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

Tony sits back, trying to cover another wince without much success, staring determinedly at the wall next to Steve. “I can’t honestly say whether I believe that or not,” he says slowly, and when Steve tries to speak again, he holds up a hand for silence. “You were right. I had the best chance at getting us out of there, and I remember what I told you years ago. Realistically, I was the best choice to send.” There’s a pause, and it feels like everyone in the room is holding their breath. “But that’s not why you chose me.”

Steve steps forward this time, ignoring the threatening looks from Potts and Rhodes. “Tony, please, that’s not true,” he says, and if it weren’t for the hard truths Sam’s had to accept, if it weren’t for the fact that Tony is sitting in a bed covered in bandages and with weeks of new trauma under his belt, while Steve stands there perfectly healthy and healed and defending his betrayal thanks to Tony getting them out of there… if it weren’t for all of the reasons Steve’s lost Sam’s trust lately, Sam might actually believe the sincerity in his tone.

Tony doesn’t say anything else, just closes his eyes and sits back, shaking his head the tiniest bit. Potts leans over into his shoulder, and he finally releases Rhodes, who stands and moves to the end of the bed, putting himself between Steve and Tony. “It’s time to leave,” he says, and his tone leaves no room for argument. Steve looks like he wants to say something else to Tony, but Rhodes gives him a severe look and he turns and leaves the room with nothing more than a pained look.

Rhodes turns to Sam once Steve leaves, raising an eyebrow. It’s hard to be sure, but Sam thinks it might be a question rather than a demand that he leave. Sam thinks he might have earned a tiny bit of goodwill, but he won’t abuse it by staying here when Tony is so clearly tired of the discussion. “I’ll just… go too,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the door. “I’ll, um… be back later, if you—if that’s okay.”

He can’t help but glance back at Tony at that, but Tony is leaning into Potts, who’s wrapping him in an embrace, and he looks like he’s tuned out the rest of the world. Rhodes answers for him instead. “Yeah. When we’re feeling more up to it,” he says, and once again Sam gets that sense of reluctant approval. He nods, deciding to leave on that good note, and moves to the door.

Steve is just down the hallway, slumped against a wall, face in his hands. He’s a picture of grief, and some part of Sam feels a pang of genuine sympathy for him. If he’s learned anything over the past few weeks, it’s that nothing is as black and white as he used to think. Turning Steve into an irredeemable villain will lead him to as many bad judgments and worse decisions as turning Tony into one did. 

When he hears Sam approaching, Steve looks up, and his eyes are red. Sam wants to look away from the evidence of his grief. It’s easier to be mad at him than to think of him as a good man who’s flawed and human and might actually regret what he’s done. “Sam,” Steve says, and his voice nearly cracks. “I didn’t choose him because of what happened… before. You have to believe that.”

It’s clear that he’s desperate for _someone_ to believe him, to validate the justifications he’s given himself, but Sam can’t do it. Gone are the days when he blindly believed everything Steve told him. He takes a moment to think, choosing his words carefully. “I think… that you might tell yourself that, Steve, but it doesn’t make you right. Maybe there were good reasons to do what you did, but in the end… you were just hurting other people and saving yourself. Maybe I don’t have room to judge—I wasn’t in that situation, I don’t have your history with Tony, I’m not you. But no matter what reasons you had, no matter what the outcome was… I still think that you’re a coward for choosing Tony, no matter what either of you say about it. And I’m not sure I’ll ever stop thinking that.”

Steve closes his eyes, face twisting. His already defeated posture sags even more, like he can barely stand under his own weight anymore. After a few moments of heavy silence, however, he straightens again and opens his eyes. Facing his problems, at least. “Sam… how can I fix this?”

That’s the million dollar question, there. And finally, the right one that Steve’s asking. At least he acknowledges that there’s something broken, and that he has some responsibility for finding the solution. That’s a good first step.

The problem is that Sam doesn’t know what the second step is. He’s not sure if there even _is_ a second step, not with everything that’s happened. They still have to find a way to go back after this. Like Tony said, they have to go back to the Compound and pretend they’re getting along, but nothing is ever going to be the same, or go back to how it used to be. After everything, Sam is genuinely not sure if Tony will ever be able to forgive them, and honestly, if he doesn’t, Sam won’t blame him. The problem is the situation that that then leaves them in. 

Steve is nothing if not stubborn. And he will keep trying. He’ll do everything he can think of to try and make things right with Tony. But even if his apologies are genuine, even if he makes a real effort to change and to be better, Tony doesn’t have any obligation to ever accept his apology or to be friends with him again. But Steve will never accept that and Sam knows it. There’s also the problem of Barnes coming back, the man whose hands murdered Tony’s parents. The man that Steve was willing to turn his back on the world for, and betray a friend for. And Wanda, the girl who hates Tony and wants nothing more than to see him miserable, but lives in his home and uses his technology and fights alongside him. 

Tony’s life is a battlefield, Sam thinks. A constant war full of deadly traps and hidden enemies and very few real reprieves. He has only a few true friends to help him through it, and it seems to Sam that he’s had more awful betrayals than he has real allies who’ve stuck by him through thick and thin. There are scars on him that run far deeper than the physical ones left behind by the arc reactor. Even if, by some miracle, he manages to accept Steve’s apologies and work with him again, the scars of Steve’s betrayal will always be there. There will always be a bit of trust missing between them, and that could be a matter of life and death someday.

The future is full of unknowns. That’s the only conclusion Sam can come to. Everyone involved is an unpredictable human, and there are enough hurts and mistakes and regrets between them all to fill ten lifetimes. Steve won’t give up on the idea of being friends with Tony. And Tony won’t give up on the idea of willingly suffering for the good of the many. The whole thing is just a recipe for disaster.

And Steve is looking at him in the here and now, expecting an answer. Sam can’t know what he’s thinking, or if he really thinks there’s a simple answer out there, but Sam can’t give him anything but the plain truth. It’s not enough, and it hurts to admit the uncertainty to himself, but it’s the truth, and he’s just going to have to deal with it. They all are.

“Honestly, Steve… I don’t know if this can be fixed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We’ve reached the end! I hope you enjoyed the journey. I know it’s not a neat ending wrapped up in a nice bow, but real life rarely is. As a note, the modern art principle isn’t a real thing, it’s something between Rhodey and Tony (if I do end up writing that sequel from Tony’s POV, that would be explained briefly).


End file.
